Joyent Raises Institutional Money: Why We Did It

Today we announced that we recently closed a round of funding from Intel Capital. As entrepreneurs who founded and nurtured Joyent since 2004, and with a company that has funded itself entirely from revenues from selling products to our customers (with the exception of early seed capital put in by Peter Thiel, myself, and other friends and family), taking funding from an institution represents a significant decision for me and Jason and the rest of the team.

Joyent has been able to grow to thousands of customers globally by force of hard work, a lot of luck, and an extraordinary time when the costs of developing and delivering software products have dropped practically to zero. While Joyent has been profitable for much of the company’s existence, we raised money because Joyent has a revenue model, and a product model and roadmap, that we believe can benefit from immensely increased scale. Joyent plans to take cloud computing to a place where our competitors, built on virtualization foundations such as VMWare ESX, Microsoft HyperV, XEN, KVM, won’t be able to go. That’s why Joyent raised money. We see a clear opportunity, and we intend to race towards it.

I want to thank my fellow Joyeurs for your hard work in getting Joyent to this trajectory. I especially want to thank our customers. The hard work is for you and your amazing efforts.