ElasticBox, a startup company that provides cloud services for app developers, yesterday secured $9 million in Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners and Intel Capital. Ravi Srivatsav, ElasticBox CEO and co-founder, said that the investment will allow his company to pioneer a new modular application development process.

ElasticBox introduced a modular way to develop applications in the cloud through "Boxes," encapsulated, fully configured components of an application architecture that can be combined to create and run applications in the cloud. Each Box is available as a service, is reusable and is fully mobile across cloud environments to help app developers streamline the creation, deployment and management of applications for any cloud.

"ElasticBox empowers the developer with preconfigured Boxes that they can mix and match to create applications – similar to the way a DJ blends beats and samples to create new music. It brings Dr. Dre-like creativity to enterprise application development," Srivatsav said in a blog post.

Here's how app developers can use Boxes in the ElasticBox platform:

In addition to the $9 million in Series A funding, ElasticBox raised $3.4 million in seed funding that it used to launch a new version of its platform last June. The Elastic Box platform, Version 2.0, enables enterprises to define and deploy applications in public, private and hybrid clouds. It also helped ElasticBox add customers such as Netflix.

"ElasticBox has provided us with the technology that we had been looking for but had never found a great solution. With ElasticBox, we are able to both create custom Boxes as well as leverage their preconfigured Boxes to deploy our internal applications, which allows us to focus on innovation instead of orchestration," Mike D. Kail, VP of IT Operations at Netflix, said in a blog post.

Meanwhile, a few of ElasticBox's investors might also be some of ElasticBox's biggest fans. Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Director of Nexus Venture Partners, noted that ElasticBox is overhauling enterprise application development, deployment and management within the cloud in what he feels could be "the biggest step in cloud innovation since VMware and Amazon Web Services."

Arvind Sodhani, President of Intel Capital, added that he's excited about his company's partnership with ElasticBox as well.

"ElasticBox's pioneering work removes the complexity and cost associated with developing, deploying and managing apps in the cloud and truly delivers the promise of cloud elasticity to enterprises," Sodhani said, according to a blog post. "We look forward to helping Ravi [Srivatsav] and team accelerate their growth with enterprises around the world."