Earlier this week, the Ukrainian-Russian-American startup Jelastic, which offers a cloud-based hosting platform for Java application developers, announced it has secured an investment of $2 million from Almaz Capital Partners and Foresight Ventures.
This ‘Series A’ funding round brings the startup’s total financing to $2.5 million. In December 2010, Jelastic received seed funding from Runa Capital, a Moscow-based fund that operates internationally. Jelastic recently celebrated reaching the 15,000 unique users milestone only seven months after its beta launch.
Jelastic defines its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) as the latest in Java hosting cloud platforms. “In contrast with early generation Java computing platforms, such as Google App Engine, Heroku, or Windows Azure, which required developers to manage virtual machines or adapt their applications to work in the cloud, Jelastic uses only standard software stacks, eliminating worries about code changes or lock-in,” the startup claims.
Jelastic’s co-founders Ruslan Synytskyy, Constantin Alexandrov and Alexey Skutin created their business out of necessity, industry bloggers Natasha Starkell noted in TechCrunch. “The three had been working together remotely on a different project, but what they found was that an ever-increasing amount of their time was spent on hosting tasks. Google App Engine put restrictions on the tools they could use, and even on the code itself. So the team pivoted into the direction of developing tools for application deployment.”
Since its foundation in 2010, Jelastic has made its offer available internationally through a network of hosting companies, including Servint in the US, Dogado/HostEurope in Europe, and Rusonyx in Russia. The startup is a resident of the IT cluster of Skolkovo, the international tech hub under completion near Moscow.
The PaaS market will amount to at least $9.8 billion over the next five years, according to Foresight Ventures partner Andrey Kazakov.
