LOS GATOS, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 03/07/13 -- Pertino, a company reinventing networking for the cloud era, today announced it has raised $20 million in Series B funding. New investor Jafco Ventures led the round with participation from existing investors, including Norwest Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. After a successful limited availability launch last month that generated significant customer momentum, Pertino will use new funds to continue executing against its software-defined network (SDN) cloud platform vision and building out its go-to-market strategy. This latest round of funding brings Pertino's total amount raised to $28.85 million.

The investment from Jafco Ventures validates Pertino's position as a leader in the movement to reinvent networking for the cloud era, and a first-mover in bringing SDN-powered wide-area networks (WANs) to the masses. Pertino joins Jafco's impressive portfolio of cloud and network security companies such as Reputation.com, Huddle, FireEye and Palo Alto Networks.

"One of the things that attracted us to Pertino is the fact they have built a cloud-based solution leveraging the most innovative and disruptive technology to hit networking in a decade -- SDN, and they're delivering it in a practical and consumable way to an underserved global market," said Jeb Miller, general partner at Jafco. "Disruptive technology and a massive global market opportunity, coupled with the pedigree and experience of the executive team, makes Pertino an ideal portfolio company for us."

Globalization, the rise of cloud services, an increasingly mobile workforce, and the proliferation of mobile devices are trends that are all converging on small-to-medium businesses today. As a result, SMBs are becoming more dependent on WANs than ever before, but the cost and complexity of traditional network technology is proving to be a barrier. With Pertino's cloud network engine, businesses of any size can build a secure, cloud-based network in minutes with no hardware, expertise, or upfront investment required, enabling employees to connect to IT resources from anywhere in the world just as easily as they do in the office.

"SMBs comprise almost half of IT spending worldwide, yet a significant number of these organizations struggle with having the resources to deploy new technology and applications," said Craig Elliott, Pertino co-founder and CEO. "By leveraging the cloud and SDN technology to radically simplify networking, Pertino is poised to unlock a massive opportunity and Jafco's SMB and business development experience in Asia will help us realize it."

Pertino announced limited availability of its cloud network engine service last month, after concluding a successful beta program within the Spiceworks IT community that resulted in over 250 customers deploying and testing their own Pertino cloud network. Since then, the number of deployed customers has grown to over 700. Now available worldwide, Pertino allows customers to build a free network for up to three members with three devices each, and then pay only $10 per member per month as they grow.

Pertino previously raised an $8.85 million Series A round of funding co-led by Norwest Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners in April 2012.

About Pertino
Founded in 2011, Pertino has an inspired vision for reinventing networking for the cloud era, and in the process, being a catalyst for democratizing IT for small-to-medium businesses. Globalization, cloud-enabled IT, and growing demand for always-connected people, devices, and things is affecting businesses of all sizes -- making the "outside network" as critical as the inside one. However, traditional wide-area networks have not kept pace. Pertino's revolutionary cloud network engine enables any business to build a simple and secure cloud-based network that connects people and IT resources from anywhere on the planet. No new hardware. No expertise. No upfront investment. To achieve this breakthrough, Pertino has developed a software platform that combines the power and pervasiveness of the cloud with Software-defined Network (SDN) and network virtualization technology, and a social-inspired user management paradigm. The company is venture funded and headquartered in Los Gatos, Calif. For more information or to try Pertino for yourself, please visit pertino.com.

About Jafco Ventures
Based in Palo Alto, Jafco Ventures is a venture capital partnership that invests in early-stage companies with great teams that demonstrate differentiated technology, compelling business models and momentum in their respective markets. The firm's focus is to help portfolio companies efficiently scale to realize great outcomes. To support this challenge the partnership consists of a core team of proven, early-stage venture capital investors, augmented by venture partners with best-in-class experience in scaling companies and a world-class business development team based in Tokyo. For more information about Jafco Ventures visit us at www.jafco.com.

About Norwest Venture Partners
Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) is a multi-stage investment firm that has partnered with entrepreneurs to build great businesses for more than 50 years. The firm manages over $3.7 billion in capital and has funded more than 500 companies since inception. Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., NVP has subsidiaries in Mumbai and Bengaluru, India and Herzelia, Israel. NVP makes early to late-stage venture and growth equity investments across a wide range of sectors including: technology, information services, business services, financial services, consumer products/services and healthcare. For more information visit: www.nvp.com. Follow NVP on Twitter @NorwestVP.

About Lightspeed Venture Partners
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital firm with over $2 billion of committed capital under management. Lightspeed's investment professionals and advisors are located in Silicon Valley, India, and Israel. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed more than 200 companies, many of which have become leaders in their respective markets, including Blue Nile, Brocade, Ciena, DoubleClick, Fusion-io, Galileo Technology, Informatica, Nicira, Phone.com, Playdom, Pliant, Riverbed, and XtremeIO. For more information, visit the Lightspeed website: www.lightspeedvp.com.