Nebula
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Nebula sold enterprise private-cloud infrastructure: a hardware-and-software package, anchored by the Nebula One appliance, that let businesses deploy large private computing clouds running the open-source OpenStack platform on ordinary servers. Founded by former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, one of OpenStack's original creators, the company positioned itself as the 'world's first enterprise cloud computer', with customers including Lockheed Martin, Genentech, Shutterfly, and Sandia National Laboratories. It was backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Highland Capital Partners, Comcast Ventures, and prominent individual investors.
02 / Nebula FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Nebula ran out of money because the enterprise OpenStack market matured far more slowly than a venture-backed timeline could afford. In its shutdown statement, the management team said the market would take several more years to mature and, as a venture-backed startup, the company did not have the resources to wait. The company faced intense competition from deep-pocketed vendors such as Red Hat, IBM, HP, VMware, and EMC investing heavily in their own OpenStack distributions, and the appliance model arrived before second-wave enterprise customers were ready to buy simple, turnkey OpenStack.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Nebula was founded.
- Operations ended
Nebula ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
On April 1, 2015, Nebula announced it was ceasing operations, stating it had exhausted all alternatives.
- 02
Existing Nebula private clouds kept running, but the company ended product support, pointing customers to compatible OpenStack offerings from Red Hat, IBM, HP, and others.
- 03
By May 2015, Oracle had hired about 90% of Nebula's engineering team (roughly 40 engineers) into its infrastructure-as-a-service organization.
- 04
In total the company burned through roughly $38.5 million in venture capital over its lifetime without reaching profitability.