Unicorns 60/229 – Pivotal Software

PIVOTAL

Founders: Dell Technologies (Parent Company)
Key people: Rob Mee (CEO), Paul Maritz (Chairman)
Number of employees: ~1000

Pivotal Software, Inc. (Pivotal) is a software and services company based in San Francisco and Palo Alto, California, with several other offices. Divisions includ e Pivotal Labs for consulting services, the Pivotal Cloud Foundry development group, a group developing some products for the big data market.

History

Pivotal Software was formed in 2012 after spinning out of EMC Corporation and VMware (which was majority-owned by EMC). The name came from the Pivotal Labs LLC which had been acquired by EMC, and briefly used the name GoPivotal, Incorporated. On April 24, 2013, the organization announced a $105 million investment from General Electric (for 10% equity) and Pivotal One, including Cloud Foundry for cloud computing.

Paul Maritz became Pivotal’s chief executive immediately after the spin-out. Maritz had joined EMC in February 2008 when Pi Corporation, a company he co-founded, was acquired and was previously the CEO of VMware. The Greenplum Database (acquired by EMC in 2010) formed the basis of a division selling software for the big data market. In March, 2013, a distribution of Apache Hadoop called Pivotal HD was announced, including a version of the Greenplum software for it called Hawq.

Paul Maritz became Pivotal’s Chairman and Rob Mee, founder of Pivotal labs, became chief executive officer of Pivotal Software on August 18, 2015. In May, 2016, a $253 million round of investment was announced, including Microsoft and Ford. EMC also converted $400 million of debt into equity at that time.