Sacramento-based Gluware Inc. recently raised $43 million in funding that is expected to accelerate the company's growth and advance intelligent network automation for the cloud era.
Gluware's software platform analyzes an enterprise's network to expose security violations, outage limitations and misconfigurations in an effort to improve the network's performance and security at cloud scale. Gluware's solutions work to reduce businesses' risk of unplanned network outages and provide visibility and intelligence from network data.
Gluware co-founder and CEO Jeff Gray said enterprise network teams are challenged by evolving cybercrime, software vulnerabilities and human error, which makes it difficult to keep up with the cloud's speed of innovation without the support of intelligent network automation. Gluware was created to help address that.
Gray said the latest funding will help the company grow and bring networking innovations to more of the market.
"The growth funding will be used to scale our sales and marketing functions, and we also have a number of applications in development, so we will be using the funding to accelerate those apps that we are working to bring to market," he told the Business Journal.
Gluware currently has 61 employees, but Gray said he expects it to grow to over 100 employees over the next two quarters. The company plans to immediately begin hiring for positions across the board, including development, sales, marketing and support.
Gray said the funding was raised through a mixture of equity and debt. The investment was led by Bain Capital LP, with participation by Acadia Woods Partners and existing Gluware investors. Boston-based Bain Capital is one of the world's leading private multi-asset alternative investment firms, with more than 1,200 employees and approximately $150 billion in assets under management, according to a news release.
"We are excited to support Gluware's next phase of growth and accelerate the company's innovative technology and mission-critical solutions to continue meeting the modern needs of enterprises while strengthening its value-proposition to its customers, suppliers and partners," Bain Capital Managing Director Olof Bergqvist said in a news release.
Gluware is on track to achieve 400% annual recurring revenue growth, Gray said. He declined to disclose more specifics about the private company's finances but said it is well into a nine-figure valuation and has a goal to get into the 10-figure range.
"This is about putting much more gas in the tank to be able to grow even faster," Gray said.
