Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel

Mirantis Inc. has snagged $100 million in funding to step up its campaign for OpenStack dominance amid increasing competition from both fellow startups and larger incumbent vendors vying for a slice of the hottest trend in the cloud. The record-breaking round, the company’s second, marks the biggest venture capital infusion in the history of the ecosystem.

The increased investor interest in OpenStack has not come out of the blue but rather as a response to a steadily accelerating wave of adoption that the three-year-old Mirantis is riding with full sail. The firm claims to have signed up over 130 customers – more than any other distributor – for its platform, notably Comcast Corp., PayPal and NASA, the birthplace of the project, along with a sizable portion of the world’s top telecoms.

One reason all those companies are choosing Mirantis over better-established rivals such as Red Hat Inc. and SUSE Linux GmbH is that those companies bundle their operating system flavors into their OpenStack distributions, whereas Mirantis is pursuing a “no lock-in” strategy that centers on allowing customers to use whatever software works best for the use case at hand, even if it’s from competitors.

That approach is almost antithetical to Red Hat’s, which – while staunchly sticking by its stated tradition of providing users with freedom of choice – is assembling a homegrown stack around its OpenStack distro that runs from the underlying operating system to development tools. Mirantis, in contrast, has opted to leave most of the rest of the stack to partners, with the exception of certain strategic functionality that it has mostly released in open-source form.

That includes the FUEL library for OpenStack deployment and, more notably, the Sahara project for integrating with Hadoop, which was bundled into the latest “Juno” release of the cloud platform that launched last Wednesday. It now constitutes the core of Red Hat’s batch processing framework in a rare example of a startup quite literally setting the pace for the incumbents.

The new $100 million from Insight Venture Partners, August Capital and exiting investors is meant to accelerate that momentum. Mirantis said that the funding, which brings its total raised to $120 million, will be used to “double” investments in its flagship distro and managed offering. Another part of the capital will go toward bolstering the firm’s presence in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, both in terms of physical footprint and partner reach.