Nimbula raises $15 million more for private cloud

Nimbula, a provider of cloud infrastructure software and founded by former Amazon executives Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, on Monday announced that it has secured $15 million in its second round of venture capital funding led by Accel Partners. That brings total funding to more than $20 million. Current investor Sequoia Capital, which led Nimbula's first round of venture financing, also participated in this round.

Nimbula emerged from stealth mode in June and in fact has remained somewhat stealthy. The basic premise of the software is to provide private-cloud infrastructure similar to Amazon Web Services EC2 platform--an approach quite similar to the open-source Eucalyptus project.

There have been quite a few start-ups geared toward private cloud to emerge over the last year or two (Eucalyptus, Makara) and several acquisitions (Platespin, 3Tera, 4Base) so there is little question that there is market demand for these types of solutions.

What's interesting to note is how much money private-cloud providers are raising, which makes me wonder if developing private-cloud software is an inherently expensive proposition.

If so, then these investments have some merit in the sense that most IT shops will choose one rather than having to build everything themselves. That said, with no clear private-cloud winner, there is plenty of opportunity for an Apache-esque open-source solution to wrest control of the market.