Super Angels Offer DotCloud $800,000

March 1, 2011 Off By David
Object Storage
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Flexible platform as a service startup DotCloud has raised $800,000 in angel funding, although it should be seeing a lot more money if its alignment with the evolution of the PaaS space is any indication. Like developer-focused PaaS offerings before it (e.g., Heroku, Google App Engine, PHP Fog and the like), DotCloud prides itself on simplicity, but it sets itself apart by providing a flexible platform that supports a wide range of development languages and tools, including Java, Ruby, PHP, Hadoop, and a variety of relational and NoSQL database options.

According to its web site, users need only select from the list of supported components, and DotCloud automates the rest of the process. It’s similar to what Heroku has begun doing with its Add-On program, although it also bears a resemblance to Amazon Web Services’ recent efforts such as Elastic Beanstalk and even CloudFormation. Either way, DotCloud is in good company. For a while now, the PaaS versus IaaS argument has boiled down to a case of ease-of-use versus flexibility in terms of choosing the various layers of the application stack. Heroku, which focuses on Ruby, raised $13 million before Salesforce.com bought it for $212 million, so the sky might be the limit for DotCloud if it really can match PaaS levels of automation with IaaS levels of flexibility.

DotCloud’s angel investors include Ron Conway, Chris Sacca, Jerry Yang, Raymond Tonsing, Roger Dickey, Ash Patel, Eric Urhane, Kenny Van Zant and Trinity Ventures.