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CIQ Closes $26 Million Series A Led by Two Bear Capital

  • CIQ brings a global hybrid software infrastructure and computing platform to market

  • CIQ is the founding services and support partner of Rocky Linux, which is downloaded more than a quarter million times per month, making it the the fastest growing Linux distribution for enterprise use-cases

  • Google recently announced a partnership with CIQ to make Rocky Linux an official first-party Google supported offering on GCP

RENO, Nev., May 11, 2022 / -- CIQ, a software infrastructure leader that works in every part of the technology stack to develop stable, scalable, and secure solutions for customers and communities, today announced they have secured $26 million in Series A venture capital funding led by Two Bear Capital.

CIQ was created to empower everyone to do amazing things by continuously enhancing the software infrastructure stack so people can focus on what they do best. CIQ does this through cross-pollinating enterprise, cloud, and hyperscale, with high performance computing and bringing forth a complete stack, from bare metal provisioning/imaging, operating system, containers, orchestration, and federated computing.

CIQ is also the founding sponsor and services partner behind Rocky Linux, the premier community-maintained and freely available enterprise Linux distribution founded by Gregory M. Kurtzer, one of the original founders of CentOS.

"We launched CIQ to improve the software infrastructure experience for everyone while disrupting the support and services industry with a truly customer-centric, customer-first solution. Starting with Rocky Linux, the fastest growing enterprise operating system today, through the software stack to a global hybrid computing platform and everything in between, CIQ is the solution behind your software infrastructure. Two Bear Capital shares this vision and together we will continue to innovate, build new functionality into our products, and create more value for the community and our customers." said Gregory Kurtzer, CIQ's Founder and CEO.

Michael Goguen, Founder and Managing Partner at Two Bear Capital and the most recent member of CIQ's board of directors said, "We see the enterprise Linux landscape changing with customers demanding the best technology from the open source community without sacrificing highly responsive support and enterprise-grade security. Greg and his team are uniquely positioned to respond to that demand today with Rocky Linux. The future of enterprise computing will combine the best from on-premises HPC and cloud architectures and CIQ's suite of enterprise workflow orchestration and hybrid cloud solutions are perfectly suited to make that combination. Two Bear Capital is proud to be part of CIQ's mission to build an enduring company creating the future of enterprise computing."

The massive growth of Rocky Linux, coupled with CIQ's disruptive support and services model has changed the way the community and customers leverage Enterprise Linux. With massive adoption already from telecommunications, media and entertainment, oil and gas, financials, large retail, and HPC, CIQ drives value for people, teams, and organizations. Recently, CIQ announced a partnership with Google Cloud to join forces in offering best-in-class support for Rocky Linux as a direct, first-party Google supported offering.

CIQ was originally founded and funded to create the next generation flexible and scalable computing infrastructure. CIQ's original investors include OpenDrives, a software company enabling performant enterprise storage, and IAG Capital Partners, an early-stage technology firm that led CIQ's bridge round in 2021. The company offers customers imaging and provisioning with Warewulf, container solutions, with Singularity/Apptainer, and a traditional computing stack. CIQ has also created the vision for HPC-2.0 with Fuzzball, a cloud native, cloud federated computing meta-orchestration platform for performance intensive use-cases. Fuzzball is a unified solution for enterprise and scientific workloads, data management, orchestration, and composable hardware and clouds.

"As we transition into heterogeneous High Performance Computing (HPC) environments, Sandia is investigating ways to improve workflow efficiency and harness a fundamentally more complex ecosystem. Doing so without exposing the underlying complexity to the end user will likely require a new methodology for HPC. Our work with CIQ on Fuzzball allows us to pursue the emerging space in HPC 2.0 and leverage on-premise, cloud, and container technologies and their applicability to our evolving mission requirements." – Andrew J. Younge, Ph.D., Sandia National Laboratories

About CIQ

CIQ empowers people to do amazing things by providing innovative and stable software infrastructure solutions for all computing needs. From the base operating system, through containers, orchestration, provisioning, computing, and cloud applications, CIQ works with every part of the technology stack to drive solutions for customers and communities with stable, scalable, secure production environments. CIQ is the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux, and the creator of the next generation federated computing stack. For more information, please visit https://ciq.com

About Two Bear Capital

Two Bear Capital (TBC) was founded and is led by veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist and philanthropist Michael Goguen. TBC seeks to invest in the most promising early-stage companies solving some of today's most urgent problems at the intersections of healthcare, biotechnology, bioinformatics, artificial intelligence/machine learning, cybersecurity, and software infrastructure for enterprise. TBC's investment team is based in Whitefish, Montana, the San Francisco Bay area, San Diego, and Boston. To learn more, visit https://www.twobearcapital.com/ and follow TBC on LinkedIn.