Atlantis raises 20 million greenbacks to flog virty desktop software

D-round takes pot up to $30m total

Privately-owned Atlantis Computing has just raised $20m to flog its Atlantis ILIO desktop virtualisation software around the world.

ILIO – In Line Image Optimisation - has virtual machines running inside a server's RAM and delivers virtual desktops at less than $300 per desktop.

The company's second CEO, Bernard Harguindeguy, came on board in December 2009 when founder and then-CEO Chetan Venkatesh stepped back to become chief technology officer. He, with others, holds a couple of patents relating to VDI, virtual machines and deduplication.

Harguindeguy must have a brief to expand the company. From its founding in 2004 through to most of 2010, Atlantis survived and prospered on just $5 million of funding. El Reg assumes this came from private individuals - angel investors in other words.

Eight months after Harguindeguy took the helm, the company raised $10m in C-round venture funding, with the cash to be used for sales growth, marketing activities and international expansion. Now there is a $20m D-round led by new investor Adams Street Partners with existing investors Cisco Systems, El Dorado Ventures and Partech International pumping dollars in too. Again, the cash is to be used for worldwide expansion.

Harguindeguy has opened investors' wallets because Atlantis Computing "is behind the largest and most successful desktop virtualisation deployments in the world. [It has] more than tripled its customer base over the past year, and now has over 250 customers with more than 300,000 licences sold".

The company could be attempting to break out of a VDI niche. It tells the world that "ILIO will be available soon for cloud-scale deployments of virtual servers such as databases, collaboration and mail servers".

Server virtualisation is beginning to look like a magic carpet that is silently ferrying server applications to the cloud, with VDI enjoying a ride there too.

Will Atlantis need another funding round before it can either run an IPO or be bought? Perhaps not if it can reach a self-sustaining critical mass before the $20m is used up. ®