Pivotal secures $253m in Series C investment round led by Ford

5 May 2016

Agent of change - Pivotal has helped global brands including Ford transform for the digital age

Silicon Valley digital transformation and brand shaper Pivotal has just raised $253m in a Series C funding round with lead participation from motor giant Ford.

Pivotal, which is creating 130 new jobs in Dublin as part of a €100m investment over the next few years, also counts EMC, VMware and GE as investors.

Pivotal was founded in 2012 as a spinout from EMC and VMware.

The company was instrumental in the creation of the FordPass service, which enables users to monitor their car from a smartphone app and find parking spaces.

Software giant Microsoft is also coming on board as an investor in Pivotal in the latest funding round, which values the company at $2.8bn.

A pivotal digital transformer for global brands

San Francisco-headquartered Pivotal employs 2,000 people and the company generated $83m in revenue for the first quarter of this year.

Headed by CEO Rob Mee, Pivotal’s core product is Cloud Foundry, an open-source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that can run applications in the public and private cloud.

Another business unit of Pivotal, Pivotal Labs, has been credited with shaping the development culture of Silicon Valley’s most influential and valuable brands. Its Agile software development approach brings start-up speeds, predictable software methodology, and iterative product development culture to large enterprises.

Pivotal works with many of the world’s most admired brands, such as AllState, BMW, Comcast, GE and Verizon, as well as having a deep heritage working with many of the world’s most valuable internet companies.

The €100m investment announced for Dublin last October will result in recruitment for full-time software engineering, technical support, operational and general and administrative roles.

The company currently has offices at Dogpatch Labs in the Chq building in the Dublin ISFC district.

Ford Fusion image via Shutterstock

Updated 9.55am, 6 May 2016: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Pivotal had raised $232m in this funding found.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com