Virtual Instruments Raises $27.5 Million in Series D Funding

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - Sep 26, 2012) - Virtual Instruments, the leader in Infrastructure Performance Management (IPM) for physical, virtual and cloud computing environments, today announced $27.5 million in Series D funding. The funding round was co-led by Next World Capital and General Catalyst Partners with continued participation from existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners. Virtual Instruments will use the funding to invest in product development and expand its market presence.

"As customers virtualize their mission-critical applications and move to the private cloud, they recognize the need for real-time, end-to-end visibility across their entire infrastructure," said John W. Thompson, CEO, Virtual Instruments. "With this additional funding, we look forward to expanding our platform to support additional technologies and virtual environments. This round of funding demonstrates the important and expanding role Virtual Instruments will play in ensuring our customers' revenue-producing and customer-facing applications' performance and availability as they migrate from physical to virtual and cloud computing environments."

Leading analysts have stated that the pace at which the Global 2000 are migrating mission-critical workloads to private cloud environments will accelerate over the coming year. This transition is fraught with risk and is putting ever-increasing pressure on the underlying virtual and physical systems. Ensuring that the private cloud can deliver the necessary levels of performance and availability requires new capabilities for an Infrastructure Performance Management platform that can provide visibility throughout all system layers in a multi-vendor environment.

With significant growth in its customer base across all major industry verticals, including Financial Services, Healthcare, Services, Retail, Manufacturing and Government, Virtual Instruments is leading the way in the emerging Infrastructure Performance Management space with its VirtualWisdom platform. VirtualWisdom provides end-to-end visibility into real-time performance, health and utilization metrics from throughout the open system, driving improved performance and availability while lowering the total cost of the infrastructure supporting mission-critical applications. With the ability to look across a multi-layered, multi-vendor environment, VirtualWisdom enables organizations to mitigate performance and availability risks as applications are moved to a virtualized or private cloud environment. Ultimately, this helps IT establish and maintain the service levels the business requires while driving systems level optimization.

"Since we first started working with Virtual Instruments in 2010, the company's exceptionally strong team has delivered on the original promise to establish a clear leadership position in the changing IT infrastructure space," said Craig Hanson, general partner, Next World Capital. "We're proud to co-lead this new round of investment to further extend the product portfolio and build an unrivaled market presence in the Infrastructure Performance Management category."

"Virtual Instruments is a foundational company delivering solutions to some of the most complex IT enterprises in the world," said Hemant Taneja, managing director, General Catalyst Partners. "Their focus on helping their clients manage the transition from physical to virtual and cloud environments is truly exciting. We are thrilled to support a very strong management team that can execute on this vision."

About General Catalyst Partners
General Catalyst Partners is a venture capital firm that invests in exceptional entrepreneurs who are building the technology-based companies that will lead innovation and transform industries. Founded in 2000, General Catalyst Partners leverages its principals' extensive operational, business development and technological expertise to provide portfolio companies with a catalyst for success through business-building and partnership development assistance. General Catalyst has offices in Cambridge, MA and Palo Alto, CA. For more information, please visit: http://www.generalcatalyst.com.

About Lightspeed Venture Partners
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital firm with over $2 billion of committed capital under management. Lightspeed's investment professionals and advisors are located in Silicon Valley, India, Israel and China with Lightspeed China Partners. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed more than 200 companies, many of which have become leaders in their respective markets, including Blue Nile, Brocade, Calista, Ciena, DoubleClick, eHealth, Fusion-io, Galileo Technology, Informatica, Kiva Software, Kosmix, Link-A-Media, LivingSocial, Lucky Pai, Nicira, Playdom, Pliant, Riverbed Technology, Solazyme, TutorVista, Virsa Systems, Waveset, and XtremIO. For more information, visit Lightspeed at www.lsvp.com or follow on Twitter at @lightspeedvp.

About Next World Capital
Next World Capital (NWC) is an international expansion-stage venture capital firm that invests in leading enterprise software, mobile and consumer internet companies. NWC has $200 million of assets under management and offices in San Francisco, Paris, and Brussels. The firm brings strategic insight and in-depth sector acumen to help its portfolio companies grow into market leaders. Notably, NWC has a strong heritage in Europe and runs a dedicated business development operation and extensive network to help its companies accelerate growth internationally. For more information, please visit www.nextworldcap.com.

About Riverwood Capital
Riverwood Capital is a globally-focused private equity firm that invests in high-growth businesses in the technology and services industries, across a variety of verticals and geographies. Riverwood has offices in Menlo Park, CA and New York, NY and currently has more than 20 investments in North America, Latin America and Asia. Please visit www.riverwoodcapital.com.

About Virtual Instruments
Virtual Instruments is a leader in Infrastructure Performance Management for physical, virtual and cloud computing environments. The award-winning VirtualWisdom® platform provides visibility into real-time performance and health of the entire open systems stack along with metrics that assess utilization. Virtual Instruments improves the performance and availability of mission-critical applications while lowering the cost of the supporting infrastructure. Forbes Magazine recognized the company as #6 on its 2011 list of America's Most Promising Companies. Virtual Instruments investors include General Catalyst Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Next World Capital and Riverwood Capital. The company was founded in June 2008 via a spin-out from Finisar Corp.; it has headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and can be found online at http://www.virtualinstruments.com.