DigitalOcean Inc., provider of a “developer cloud” aimed at simplifying the creation of modern apps, today announced it has raised $50 million on a $1.15 billion valuation, giving the company “unicorn” status for the first time.

The Series C round was led by Access Industries and included Andreessen Horowitz. DigitalOcean said the funding would be used to maintain its profitable growth rate and meet a surge in demand.

Founded in 2011, DigitalOcean offers an IaaS service designed to allow developers and businesses to deploy and scale any application in the cloud. The company claims that it allows the acceleration of software development so that developers can spend more time on building features versus managing infrastructure.

In its nearly 10 years, DigitalOcean has amassed more than 500,000 customers globally, with nearly two-thirds outside the U.S. DigitalOcean said it has $300 million in annual recurring revenue. Customers include Docker Inc., GitLab Inc., Slack Inc., HashiCorp Inc., WeWork and Splunk Inc.

“We are now freed up to focus on accelerating revenue growth, transitioning to free cash flow profitability in 2020, and positioning our company ultimately to be a public company,” DigitalOcean Chief Executive Officer Yancey Spruill told Crunchbase News. “We differentiate our service with an easy-to-understand set of options. Simplicity is embedded in our entire customer experience and that is attractive in this environment and we are priced competitively to boot.”

In August the company launched support for managed MySQL and Redis database services, while in February 2019 it launched a new managed database service.

Including the new funding, DigitalOcean has raised $455.4 million, including a $130 million line of credit in 2016 and a raise of $83 million in 2015. Previous investors include EquityZen, Viaduct Ventures, Might Capital, Opus Bank, Barclays Investment Bank, East West Bank and HSBC.

Photo: DigitalOcean