Now, Grand Rapids, Mich -Blue Medora, a technology company based, announced they have received an additional $1 25 million growth capital from two West Michigan-based angel investment groups: Start Garden and the Grand Angels. The company plans to use the new funding to boost its continued rapid expansion and marketability of its unique set of virtualization and cloud monitoring and management plugins that extend the functionality of popular enterprise management systems such as Oracle Enterprise Manager and IBM Tivoli.
The investment includes $500,000 from Start Garden, a Grand Rapids startup seed fund set up by Rick DeVos, and $750,000 from Grand Angels, a regional angel investment group. While Start Garden typically provides $5,000 investment to startups for early support, DeVos said Blue Medora is the latest in a series of recent investments in more seasoned, second-stage companies demonstrating market potential.
“With the investment of Blue Medora, we have invested aggressively in seasoned entrepreneurs working in a space with vast potential that they know very well,” DeVos said.
Blue Medora co-founder and CEO Nathan Owen said the company is well positioned to capitalize on a tremendous opportunity by providing a unique, much-needed virtualization solution for users of popular enterprise management solutions such as IBM Tivoli and Oracle EM. He said Blue Medora’s current market potential is due to a partnership with another Big Rapids-based IT firm Atomic Object, a long-standing and close relationship with IBM, and his own team’s passion for providing what they believe to be a game-changing solution for a vast community of enterprise system users.
“We were incredibly fortunate to be part of the kind of perfect storm of ideas-meeting opportunities that are creating great solutions for technology users,” said Owen. “First support from visionary organizations like Start Garden, Grand Angels and Atomic Object means that we have been able to leverage our ideas and long-standing relationships with companies like IBM, Oracle and VMware to create a set of first-in-category, much-needed solutions in this space. “That’s right.
Blue Medora was founded as a partnership between Owen and Atomic Object in 2007. They spent the first 18 months developing their initial product, linking the monitoring and management capabilities of a key IBM product to a number of critical Oracle applications, including PeopleSoft and Siebel.
Owen said IBM has already licensed a number of Blue Medora virtualization and cloud management products, which have doubled in size from 11 to 22 employees since 2011 and are expected to employ up to 35 people in the next 18 months. He also said that Blue Medora is rapidly gaining critical speed in the marketplace, including a customer portfolio of more than 50 companies that are currently using their solutions, and that they are starting to attract notice from analyst groups like IDC and Gartner. The company’s current development strategy includes the introduction of systems management and monitoring solutions designed to extend the virtualization capabilities of Oracle EM through VMware integration.
“Systems management is evolving rapidly Companies are moving away from single solution system management and demanding more customization and integration into cloud-based solutions like VMware,” said Owen. “Blue Medora has been and will continue to work with companies such as Oracle, IBM and VMware to provide cutting-edge solutions to meet the changing needs of their customers. “That’s right.
Headquartered in Grand Rapids, Mich Blue Medora has developed a range of validated/certified integration products that extend the monitoring and management capabilities of IBM and Oracle’s market-leading systems management platforms to world-leading cloud, virtualization, ERP, CRM, enterprise directory, and messaging software. Visit
