CoreOS Receives Investment From Andreessen Horowitz And Sequoia

Techcrunch Oct 9
CoreOS, a Y Combinator alum, has received investment from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital for its new Linux-based operating system designed to run like Google would run its own cloud infrastructure. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but CEO and Co-Founder Alex Polvi said the amount is in the $1 million to $5 million range.
Polvi who sold Cloudkick to Rackspace in 2010, said the funding will help it show customers the differences and advantages that come with its operating system that he says is like Southwest Airlines of Linux versus Red Hat, which he compares more to old-school United Airlines. With the backing of such high-powered venture capitalists, Polvi said they will offer professional services to provide an easy, “click-through,” set up.
CoreOS is lightweight, built for large-scale deployments. It borrows from Google Chrome OS, specifically in terms of its distributed management of thousands of servers. It allows for a customer to boot up clusters of servers out of the box, compared to Ubuntu and Red Hat and Debian which were originally developed several years ago for smaller deployments. In those days, customers were deploying just a few servers and did not require the scaling that more customers need now. Today’s complexity means that it can be a fire drill to patch thousands of servers. With CoreOS, the infrastructure updates automatically, much like a Chrome browser updates without the user needing to worry about it.
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