Andreessen Horowitz in 8m funding of Facebook

Apr 3, 2013, 2:55pm PDT Updated: Apr 3, 2013, 3:28pm PDT

Andreessen Horowitz in $8M funding of Facebook, VMware vets' startup

View Slideshow

Former VMware product and marketing exec Karthik Rau is CEO of stealthy San Mateo startup SignalFuse, which just raised $8 million in a round involving Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz. He previously worked with Horowitz at early cloud tech company Loudcloud.

Sponsored Links
	Cisco SmartPlay—UCS C-Series Servers Bundle discounts on Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers with Intel® Xeon® processors www.buildprice.cisco.com
	Office VoIP Phone Systems Get unlimited calling and faxing. Easy set-up. No contracts required. www.ringcentral.com/office
Get Listed Here

Cromwell Schubarth

Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal

Email | Twitter | Google+

SignalFuse, a stealthy startup founded by former executives of VMware and Facebook, surfaced Wednesday with a regulatory filing that indicates it raised $8 million from Andreessen Horowitz founder Ben Horowitz.

The San Mateo startup lists Horowitz as a director, along with former VMware product and marketing exec Karthik Rau and former Facebook software architect Phillip Liu. The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicates there are six investors involved in the funding but doesn't name them.
SignalFuse CEO Rau was a product manager at Loudcloud, the early cloud computing venture led by Horowitz and Marc Andreessen more than 10 years ago.
The company's bare-bones website says simply:
"We are a stealth-mode company led by former Facebook and VMware executives that has raised $8M in venture financing from Andreessen Horowitz. We are hiring world-class engineers who want to work on hard problems with smart peers and build software that will be used by millions of people. If you are passionate about distributed systems, data science and statistics, or simple and elegant user interfaces, we'd love to hear from you. We are based in downtown San Mateo, 2 blocks away from the Caltrain station."
That's the same language that SignalFuse CEO Rau has on his LinkedIn profile page.
Rau indicates that the company was launched in January, after he left his most recent job as VP of products and R&D at Delphix in Menlo Park. There is a 16-month sabbatical between that job and when he left VMware in 2009 after more than six years there.
Liu says on his LinkedIn profile that he was with Facebook for 4 1/2 years after a short stint as chief architect of server automation at Hewlett-Packard. He was chief architect at Opsware for nearly eight years and was a senior software engineer at Marimba before that.

• Page 1
• 2

|View All

Cromwell Schubarth is the Senior Technology Reporter at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1823.