cloud infrastructure founded 2004 key people scott hammond ceo bryan cantrill cto products node.js smartos joyent cloud joyent smartdatacenter number of employees 80 aug 2013 parent independent 2004 2016 samsung 2016 present 1 divisions cloud software cloud hosting website www.joyent.com joyent inc is a software and services company based in san francisco california . the company specializes in application virtualization and cloud computing . contents 1 services 2 software 3 history 3.1 financing 3.2 lifetime hosting crisis and relaunch of textdrive 4 references 5 external links services edit joyentcloud joyent s hosting unit is designed to compete with amazon s ec2 cloud 2 and offers infrastructure as a service iaas and platform as a service paas for large enterprises . this hosting business is active in the segment of online social network gaming 3 where it provides services to companies such as thq 4 social game universe and traffic marketplace . the company also hosted twitter in its early days . 5 other customers include linkedin gilt groupe and kabam . 2 in june 2013 joyent introduced an object storage service under the name manta 6 and partnered in september 2013 with network appliance vendor riverbed to offer an inexpensive content delivery network . 7 in february 2014 joyent announced a partnership with canonical to offer virtual ubuntu machines . 8 software edit joyent uses and supports open source projects including ruby on rails 9 node.js 10 11 illumos and smartos which is its own distribution of illumos 2 featuring its port of the kvm hypervisor for abstracting the software from the hardware dtrace for troubleshooting and systems monitoring and the zfs file system to connect servers to storage systems . 12 the company open sourced smartos in august 2011 . 13 14 joyent has taken the software stack that evolved over time in the running of their hosted business and is now licensing that software under the name smart data center 2 to large hardware companies such as dell . 15 16 history edit joyent was founded by david paul young in the fall of 2004 17 and incorporated in july 2005 with young as executive officer and director . 18 some of the early seed money came from peter thiel . one of the early products was an online collaboration tools named joyent connector 19 an unusually large ruby on rails application which was demonstrated at the web 2.0 conference in october 2005 20 launched in march 2006 21 open sourced in 2007 22 and discontinued in august 2011 . 23 in november 2005 joyent merged with textdrive . 9 24 25 young became the chief executive of the merged company while textdrive ceo dean allen a resident of france became president and director of joyent europe . 25 jason hoffman from textdrive serving as the merged company s chief technical officer spearheaded the move from textdrive s initial focus on application hosting to massively distributed systems 26 leading to a focus on cloud computing software and services to service providers . allen left the company in 2007 . 27 28 young left the company in may 2012 and hoffman took over as interim chief executive 29 until the appointment of henry wasik in november 2012 . 30 hoffman stepped down from his position as the company s chief technical officer in september 2013 29 and took a new position at ericsson the next month . 31 bryan cantrill was appointed cto in his place in april 2014 with mark cavage assuming cantrill s former vp engineering role . 32 the company has a history of acquisitions and divestments . in 2009 joyent acquired reasonably smart a cloud startup company with products based on javascript and git . 33 in 2009 it sold off both strongspace and bingodisk to expandrive . 34 in 2010 joyent purchased layerboom a vancouver based startup that provides solutions for managing virtual machines running on windows and linux . 35 on june 16 2016 samsung announced that it was acquiring joyent . 1 financing edit in 2004 textdrive bootstrapped itself as a hosting company through crowd funding customers were invited to invest money in exchange for free hosting for the lifetime of the company . 36 textdrive and later joyent repeated the money raising procedure a number of times in order to avoid the venture capital market . 37 38 39 joyent raised venture capital for the first time in november 2009 40 from intel and dell . 41 joyent s early institutional investors include el dorado ventures epic ventures peter thiel seed round 42 intel capital series a b rounds 43 greycroft partners series a b rounds 44 liberty global series b round . in january 2012 joyent secured a new round of funding totalling 85 million from weather investment ii accelero capital and telef nica digital . 45 in october 2014 joyent raised an additional 15 million in series d funding from existing investors . 46 lifetime hosting crisis and relaunch of textdrive edit on august 16 2012 individuals who had provided start up and development funding to textdrive in exchange for lifetime shared hosting accounts were informed via email that their lifetime hosting accounts would be deleted on october 31 2012 . 47 depending on the nature of their initial investment they were offered either one or three free years of hosting on a joyent smartmachine 48 the company s cloud hosting solution after which they would be moved to a regularly billed account . customer backlash to the announcement turned out to be fierce . 37 on august 30 2012 textdrive co founder dean allen announced that he was relaunching textdrive as a separate company which would carry on joyent s shared hosting business and honor the lifetime agreements . 28 49 allen relaunched textdrive on november 1 2012 using joyent infrastructure . he was confident he would succeed in building a viable business similar to dreamhost . 50 however textdrive was spun out of joyent in february 2013 39 and began to flounder suffering from an absence of leadership and plagued by reliability issues with users leaving for other hosts . 39 the possibility for new users to sign up for textdrive 2.0 never did come to pass . on the morning of march 3 2014 allen removed all but a logo and an image from textdrive.com and placed the textdrive discussion forum discuss.textdrive.com in maintenance mode with the following announcement emphasis added . 51 as anyone looking for decent support or even useful information over the past few months can attest the revival of textdrive has not been a success . what began in mid 2012 as an exciting challenge fuelled by good intentions and lean resources quickly turned into a cleanup project with almost no resources . it is disappointing to report that after a year and a half of uphill battles and unimagined setbacks after several costly efforts to regroup and find another way options to keep textdrive growing have run out and we will cease operations on the 14th of march 2014 . for those who wish to know details of what went wrong will be made available once shutdown operations have completed . sorry to have let you down . dean references edit a b https news.samsung.com global samsung to acquire joyent a leading public and private cloud provider a b c d metz cade september 15 2011 . joyent arms cloud for death match with amazon son of solaris hypervisor locked and loaded . the register . retrieved september 2 2012 . harris derrick 2010 12 07 . joyent targets large scale online gaming . gigaom.com . retrieved 2012 07 05 . chiang oliver september 20 2010 . thq partners with cloud computing provider joyent upping investment in social games . forbes . retrieved september 4 2012 . martin richard august 1 2007 . joyent a twitter preaching its shared infrastructure . information week . retrieved 5 july 2012 . clark jack ; 25 jun 2013 2013 06 25 . joyent spins up zfs object store . the register . retrieved 2014 04 05 . clark jack 2013 09 17 . joyent turns cloud into a riverbed content delivery network . the register . retrieved 2014 04 05 . jackson jacob 2014 02 20 . joyent offers canonical customized ubuntu as a cloud service . pcworld . retrieved 2014 04 07 . a b joyent buys textdrive . alarmclock . november 28 2005 . archived from the original on march 28 2006 . thornsby jessica november 10 2010 . node.js moves to joyent . jaxenter . retrieved august 31 2012 . klint finley 2011 03 03 . joyent relaunches node.js service announces cloud analytics . readwriteweb.com . retrieved 2012 07 05 . babcock charles july 9 2012 . joyent s cloud competes with google amazon . information week . retrieved september 7 2012 . joyent announces smartos with kvm an open source modern operating system . market wire . 2011 08 15 . retrieved 2012 07 05 . higginbotham stacey august 15 2011 . joyent launches a new os for the cloud . gigaom . retrieved august 31 2012 . dell to provide joyent cloud software solution to service providers . bizcloud network . 2010 11 19 . retrieved 2012 07 05 . malik om 2010 03 24 . for dell joyent weaves a software cloud . gigaom.com . retrieved 2012 07 05 . young david 2016 06 17 . a brief history of joyent . davidpaulyoung.com . david paul young . retrieved 2016 06 23 . degraff harold 2005 07 01 . form d notice of sale of securities pursuant to regulation d section 4 6 and or uniform limited offering exemption . secdatabase.com . arrington michael october 5 2005 . the companies of web 2.0 part 1 . techcrunch . retrieved 2012 07 05 . workshops . web 2.0 conference . october 5 2005 . joyent launches web based collaboration platform enables teams to easily communicate and share information using the joyent platform s web mail calendars contacts and files . pr newswire . march 1 2006 . archived from the original on march 21 2006 . retrieved september 4 2012 . cooper peter 13 july 2013 . joyent slingshot and connector go open source . retrieved 23 june 2016 . coleman alan september 27 2011 . the end of joyent connector now what for my contacts . web dev & creative blog . joyent acquires textdrive combines recognized innovators in web 2.0 team collaboration software and advanced hosting services to lead the industry shift to network based applications . . pr newswire . november 28 2005 . retrieved september 4 2012 . a b joyent buys web host textdrive . webhost industry review . november 29 2005 . retrieved september 1 2012 . higginbotham stacey 2012 10 12 . doctor s dream jason hoffman s quest to build the new web machine . gigaom . retrieved 2014 04 04 . allen dean 2008 04 09 . alright . textism . archived from the original on april 9 2008 . a b higginbotham stacey august 30 2012 . a user revolt and the second coming of textdrive . gigaom . retrieved august 30 2012 . a b shu catherine 2013 09 09 . joyent co founder jason hoffman steps down as cto of the cloud computing pioneer . techcrunch . retrieved 2014 04 04 . williams alex 2012 11 07 . joyent appoints new ceo and pushes out joyent7 for the emerging scaled out enterprise . techcrunch . retrieved 2014 04 04 . darrow barb 2013 10 26 . jason hoffman has landed at ericsson . gigaom . retrieved 2014 04 04 . cantrill bryan . from vp of engineering to cto . dtrace.org . retrieved 16 april 2014 . malik om 2009 01 13 . joyent buys reasonably smart to create open source cloud . gigaom.com . retrieved 2012 07 05 . malik om august 13 2009 . startup