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'Boring' Amazon computational rival scoops $8m VC backing

Iron.io brings the sexy, its own type of sexy

A self-confessed “boring” computational startup challenging Amazon has piqued the interest of VCs, who’ve awarded it an $8m windfall.

Iron.io, founded in 2010, was given the lump sum as part of an A-round of cash – following on from two seed rounds totaling $5.4m.

The venture crew included Baseline Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and Ignition Partners. Iron.io claims “thousands” of users.

The five-year-old makes a web-scale message queuing and processing platform, IronWorker, for distributed apps.

IronWorker isolates code and dependencies of tasks so they can be processed on demand and easily run on massively parallel environment.

The idea is that applications are easier to scale and you can schedule jobs to run more flexibly.

It’s a multi-language environment that works with Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, .NET Node.js and Go that runs on AWS, Rackspace, Openshift and Pivotal.

Speaking of its own technology, chief executive and co-founder Chad Arimura blogged Wednesday: “This type of plumbing is pretty unsexy to most developers, but to us, it meant developer empowerment."

“This funding will fuel our growth and enable us to deliver on core enterprise features, further extending our lead as the most powerful, scalable, and developer friendly event-driven platform available,” he added.

What ever its merits, Amazon in January introduced its Lambda AWS service that Iron.io reckoned did exactly the same thing as its software.

“If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then consider us flattered by Amazon,” Iron.io co-founder and chief technology officer Travis Reeder wrote at the time.

“The new AWS Lambda service is nearly the same as Iron.io’s IronWorker service, solving the same problem with a slightly different API." ®

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