DigitalOcean Secures $37.2M in Financing Round

Cloud startup DigitalOcean has succeeded in raising $37.2 million in a financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has been investing in several smaller cloud startup companies, including cloud security specialist CipherCloud.

A startup that kicked off operations in 2012, DigitalOcean received $3.2 million in a financing round last August and is focused on the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) space, playing against some of the big kids in the cloud schoolyard including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Azure and IBM‘s (IBM) various cloud offerings. The company seems to be growing, although it has occasionally found itself in hot water with customers—sometimes due to security concerns.

DigitalOcean latest milestone was passing 1 million cloud servers in January. In two years, it has accumulated more than 150,000 customers. It’s growing quickly, and the executives over at DigitalOcean seem keen on taking on some of its largest competitors, particularly Amazon.

The new round of financing through Andreessen Horowitz should help DigitalOcean, along with investments in its products and services to continue that growth. And scoring Andreessen Horowitz as an investor could help the company along over the next phase of its growth. The venture capital firm isn’t known for straying too far from its Silicon Valley home, so it’s a bit of a surprise it took an interested in New York-based DigitalOcean.

In an interview with the New York Times, CEO Ben Uretsky noted that even after the success DigitalOcean has had, it still has a difficult time drumming up support from investors. Maybe that’s a bit of an oddity, or maybe it’s simply because the startup is trying to take business away from the giants of the industry. Not an easy thing to do, and certainly not a battle in which to make mistakes.

No details were provided on what exactly DigitalOcean will use the money for.