China’s MadeiraCloud Gets $1.5 Million Funding, Opens US Office

We’ve been following the progress of Beijing-based MadeiraCloud pretty closely since last year, and today the cloud visualization and management startup has its biggest news ever – a round of series A funding worth $1.5 million from Sequoia Capital.

MadeiraCloud founders Peng Zhao and Daniel O’Prey

The funding will be used to open an office in San Francisco and to enhance its newly rolled out support for Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service. MadeiraCloud will also grow to 12 staffers.

The simple idea behind the software-as-a-service (SaaS) MadeiraCloud platform is that it allows users to manage their AWS cloud architecture the way you design it – diagrammatically. It’s proving especially useful for startups managing an app backend on AWS as they grow and scale, and MadeiraCloud is currently utilized by thousands of users in 85 countries – from startups to large enterprise – to manage $25 million worth of AWS resources.

MadeiraCloud CEO and co-founder Daniel O’Prey puts the early success down to a “simple, familiar, self-service interface” that allows drag-and-drop re-organization that saves companies “significant time and money” in managing their servers and connections.

It seems that San Francisco will be the new base for this globally-minded startup, with Beijing retained as a development office.