My friends at Standing Cloud have closed another $3 million financing from us (Foundry Group) and Avalon Ventures. They’ve also added a long time friend, co-investor, and amazing entrepreneur Will Herman to the board.

Standing Cloud is a great example how one of our funding strategies plays out. We are the seed investors and have been working closely with the company since inception. They’ve built an incredibly deep product around a very specific aspect of the broad Cloud computing ecosystem. When they started, much of Cloud computing was total noise and marketing baloney. While there’s still plenty of that in the system, many of the products and services are maturing and the particular segment Standing Cloud has gone after has suddenly become incredibly important to a large number of hosting, managed services, and cloud providers (often the same thing) not named Amazon. Specifically:

Standing Cloud provides a seamless application layer for cloud providers, making application deployment and management fast, simple and hassle-free for their customers. Standing Cloud’s standard application catalog includes 100 open-source and commercial applications; its Platform-as-as-Service (PaaS) capabilities support multiple programming languages, including Rails, PHP, Java and Python, and a wide range of cloud service providers and orchestration software systems.

If you are a hosting, managed service provider, or building a cloud service (public or private), you have three choices. The first is to ignore this stuff (dumb). The second is to try to build it all yourself and keep pace with Amazon (good luck). The third is to use Standing Cloud.

If you want an intro, just email me and ask.