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Bracket Computing funding, valuation and investors
Enterprise 'Computing Cell' software for secure multi-cloud workload portability.
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Funding, valuation & investors
Answer-first snapshotLatest funding
Series C
$45M · October 2015
Latest known valuation
Not publicly disclosed
Total disclosed equity funding
$130M
Excludes debt, grants, acquisitions, secondaries, and IPO proceeds.
Current status
acquired
acquired · Mountain View, California
Investors in latest funding
Lead: Fidelity Management & Research
Other: Goldman Sachs , Andreessen Horowitz , Norwest Venture Partners
Overview
Bracket Computing was a Mountain View enterprise cloud company founded in 2011 by Tom Gillis and Jason Lango, both formerly of Cisco via IronPort acquisition. Its Computing Cell technology used a lightweight hypervisor (Metavisor) to encrypt and encapsulate applications with management and security policies, enabling workloads to run across public clouds with deterministic performance guarantees. The company raised over $130M from Andreessen Horowitz, Norwest Venture Partners, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, GE, and Qualcomm among others. VMware announced on May 1, 2018 that it would acquire Bracket's intellectual property and key staff; Tom Gillis joined VMware to lead the Networking and Security business unit.
Why Bracket Computing is interesting
IronPort veterans raised $130M+ to wrap apps in encrypted cells portable across AWS and Google Cloud — VMware acquired the IP and team in 2018 when multi-cloud security was still pre-Native.
Product & use cases
Computing Cell platform — encrypted application capsules with Metavisor hypervisor layer for persistent data protection and portable deployment across public cloud providers.
- Burst workloads to public cloud while keeping enterprise security policies
- Multi-cloud availability by spreading cells across AWS and Google Cloud
- Encrypted data-at-rest and in-motion for regulated financial workloads
- Deterministic performance SLAs for cloud-hosted enterprise applications
Key facts
- VMware acquired Bracket IP and staff May 1, 2018; Tom Gillis joined as SVP/GM Networking and Security (VMware announcement, Wikipedia)
- Total funding exceeded $130M from a16z, Norwest, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, GE, and Qualcomm (VentureBeat, SiliconANGLE)
- Early customers included Blackstone, DIRECTV, GE, and Wells Fargo (VentureBeat)
- a16z portfolio status: Exit
Funding history (newest first)
Series C
2015-10 $45M- Fidelity Management & Research (lead)
- Goldman Sachs (participant)
- Andreessen Horowitz (participant)
- Norwest Venture Partners (participant)
Investors in our directory
Funds linked from Bracket Computing's profile — open a fund page for stage focus and related deal articles.
Competitive landscape
Edge: Unified encryption and policy wrapper around apps independent of underlying IaaS — aimed at security-sensitive enterprises wary of raw public cloud.
Pre-2018 multi-cloud security was fragmented between cloud dashboards and manual encryption. Bracket bet on a hypervisor-level cell abstraction — technically ambitious but faced AWS/GCP native security maturation and VMware's eventual IP acquisition rather than a large standalone exit.
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RightScale adjacent
Cloud management dashboards — less native encryption and cell abstraction layer.
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Ravello (Oracle) adjacent
Nested virtualization for cloud migration — different architecture, similar multi-cloud portability pitch.
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VMware NSX incumbent
Eventually absorbed Bracket IP — network and security virtualization incumbent Bracket's team joined.
Notable stories
- Tom Gillis previously sold IronPort to Cisco — Bracket was his second infrastructure security company bet on multi-cloud cells (InformationWeek, 2014).
- Bracket spent three years in stealth before launching Computing Cells amid the Docker container craze — positioning beyond app containers to full workload security capsules (SiliconANGLE, 2014).
Industries
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