Pax8 It Wirehivevizardventurebeat – Pax8, which helps IT companies centralize provisioning and billing processes across multiple cloud apps, raises $96M and announces the acquisition of Wirehive. In a recent development in the world of enterprise application modernization, Pax8 announced that it had raised $96 million in Series B funding. Pax8 said it will use the funds to build out its product offering to other areas beyond just providing automation for IT service management teams. Pax8 was the announced acquisition of Wirehive a cloud application automation company that makes its product available on Amazon and Google App Engine.
The Wirehive team will join Pax8’s Seattle-based headquarters and continue working on Wirehive while continuing to be based in Los Angeles. Both founder and CEO of Wirehive, Mike Irvine, will join Pax8 as an adviser to the executive team while remaining as CEO of Wirehive..
The acquisition will enable Pax8 to provide automation across more cloud platforms. Wirehive’s product uses Google App Engine, which is a platform as a service (PaaS). While Pax8 offers its software as an on-premises software-as-a-service (SaaS), it will also be able to offer its cloud app management for services that run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud.
Wirehive made it possible for IT professionals to manage cloud applications as a single entity. This was done through a dashboard that showed all of their cloud apps in one place. Companies could then create and edit deployment scripts for the applications which were not yet automated, configure alerts, add users, and manage billing. Wirehive’s customers include Zillow Group, the Associated Press, NBCUniversal and Instacart.
Pax8’s software is intended to help IT departments reduce the time and cost of deploying services across cloud apps, while also reducing the ability for employees to make costly mistakes. The platform is designed to fast track changes through a company’s approval process. Once changes are approved, they are pushed out across cloud apps. This enables companies to reduce the time it takes for new employees to be productive.
Pax8 also recently announced that it was integrating with Ravello Systems, which was acquired by Red Hat for $500 million. Pax8 said that the acquisition will streamline its provisioning and discovery to the broader cloud infrastructure marketplace. Pax8’s new integration with Ravello Systems is intended to make it easier for IT teams to deploy and manage applications across both private and public clouds.
This is not the first time that an acquisition has been announced as part of Pax8’s growth strategy. Pax8 was acquired by a group of investors led by Reinventure in October 2015, which included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Gateway Fund Management and Walden Bridge Capital Partners. Pax8 also recently raised $80 million through the sale of preferred shares to institutional investors, other strategic partners and its founders.
Wirehive was founded in 2012 by Mike Irvine, a former Apple software engineer who previously worked at Yahoo and Adobe. Irvine previously worked on Yahoo Maps and Mobile Maps for the iPhone. Irvine also helped create Adobe Flash Player. Irvine previously attended University of Washington, where he co-founded a mobile payments startup called PaySage, which was sold to Rhapsody in 2007.
Pax8 was founded in 2013 by veteran executives from Zscaler, Radware and Razorfish. The company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is Dan Thompson, who also serves as chief technology officer at Zscaler.
