Abiquo, a leading developer of infrastructure management software for cloud computing environments, on Tuesday announced its launch as a U.S.-based company with $5.1 million in total new funding.

The company has previously been operating in semi-stealth mode from its founding location in Barcelona, Spain.

The funding will be used to rapidly expand its worldwide presence, grow its executive and sales and marketing teams headquartered in Redwood City, California, and increase its product development.

The funding includes a venture debt line worth $1.36 million from Kreos Capital, Europe’s leading and largest venture debt provider

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This additional funding expands on the company’s recently announced investment by Spain’s Nauta Capital and Caja Navarra (see release Abiquo closes €1.5M Series A funding and appoints Pete Malcolm as CEO). The state of Catalonia and the federal government of Spain also contributed $1.53 million in grants and soft loans, and angel investors contributed the remaining portion.

Abiquo is the first major software provider offering enterprises a complete, hypervisor-agnostic, open source cloud infrastructure management solution designed to change the way IT organizations operate their virtualized environments, making them more elastic and cost-effective to run (see release New Abiquo Cloud Management Product First to Offer Integral VMware-to-Microsoft Hyper-V Conversion).

The company also announced the appointment of Trevor Chamberlain as vice president of Business Development. Chamberlain previously held the same role at PSS Systems, a leading provider of information governance solutions. Prior to that, he spent eight years at Orchestria Corporation (founded by Abiquo CEO Pete Malcolm) in a variety of senior marketing, sales, and business development roles.

“After years of virtualization sprawl, enterprises have struggled to manage their virtualized infrastructures, causing explosive development in the rapidly expanding private and public cloud management market,” said Pete Malcolm, CEO, Abiquo. “Our complete infrastructure management solutions have been tested extensively by the open-source community, with more than 15,000 downloads, and by a number of Global 1,000 enterprises. This provides companies a proven platform to solve all aspects of their cloud management challenges, which range from creating public and private clouds, to provisioning IT resources, to automatically scaling applications on-demand. Unlike competitive products, Abiquo’s platform leverages a simple and easy-to-use graphical user interface and offers concurrent support of all major hypervisors – avoiding vendor lock-in for the customer.”

“Over the past few years, the cloud has moved from hype to reality. Emerging upstarts and large companies alike have made moves through partnerships and mergers and acquisitions to shore up a leadership position in the hotly contested cloud infrastructure management sector,” said Ross Alghren, general partner, Kreos Capital. “At the same time, open source software adoption has seen tremendous growth as more and more companies look to reduce costs while still maintaining strong IT innovation. We believe the Abiquo team, with its management, sales and marketing in the United States, and development in Spain, is uniquely qualified to bring the best of performance and cost benefits to enterprises that may be reluctant to deploy private and public cloud-based architectures without the support of a well-funded commercial company.”

“We see tremendous opportunities moving our headquarters to the United States, where the cloud infrastructure market is maturing due to pent-up demand for better cloud management solutions,” said Diego Mariño, founder and vice president, Community Solutions, Abiquo. “The competitive landscape is changing quickly and we believe the private, public cloud market is the next big opportunity for open source solutions. This move, coupled with the right team, added funding, and exceptional technical experience positions Abiquo to become a global player in this large and fast growing market sector.”

• Cloud Computing Start-Up Picks the Lock on Hypervisors
• New Abiquo Cloud Management Product First to Offer Integral VMware-to-Microsoft Hyper-V Conversion