Azul Systems Closes Strategic Growth Equity Investment With Vitruvian Partners

UNNYVALE, Calif., April 01, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Azul Systems (Azul), the leader in Java runtimes, today announced that it has closed a strategic growth equity investment led by London-based Vitruvian Partners and New York-based Lead Edge Capital. The investment agreement was previously announced by the parties on March 4, 2020.

Azul is the largest independent Java vendor, a significant contributor to the OpenJDK open source project, and a leading provider of commercial support for OpenJDK. It delivers high-performance, fully-supported and standards-compliant Java runtimes and essential Java updates to enterprises, ISVs and OEMs worldwide. Azul’s customers include over 25% of the Fortune 500, 50% of Forbes Top 10 World’s Most Valuable Brands, and 100% of the world’s Top 10 financial trading companies. Azul’s Java runtimes power Microsoft Azure, the cloud infrastructure of companies like Netflix, Workday, Bazaarvoice, and Priceline, the software made by Adobe, Software AG, and SAS, and the operations and products of Credit Suisse, Mizuho, BMW, Mastercard, LG, Deutsche Telekom, and Avaya.

“Azul has enjoyed rapid growth and established itself as a clear market leader in Java,” said Sophie Bower-Straziota, Partner at Vitruvian. “Azul has an exceptionally high caliber global team, and we believe this growth investment will allow Azul to continue to scale the team, develop innovative products, make strategic acquisitions and ultimately serve a rapidly increasing number of customers worldwide. Azul is exactly the type of company we have a successful track record of supporting.”

“Since inception, Azul has remained exclusively focused on building the world’s best products to serve the Java community,” said Scott Sellers, Azul Systems co-founder, President and CEO. “We’re extremely proud of the company we’ve built and the culture of excellence we’ve created. This partnership with Vitruvian will help fuel our growth initiatives and enable us to catapult Azul to a new level of presence in the community and the market overall.”

Gunderson Dettmer Stough Villeneuve Franklin & Hachigian, LLP served as the company’s legal advisors. Vitruvian was advised by Shea & Company and Trigon as financial advisors and Kirkland & Ellis LLP as legal advisor.

About Azul Systems
Twitter: @azulsystems

Azul Systems, the industry’s only company exclusively focused on Java and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), builds fully supported, certified standards-compliant Java runtime solutions that bring the power of Java to the enterprise, cloud, and embedded/IoT. Zing is a JVM designed for a wide variety of enterprise Java applications and workloads that may require any combination of low latency, high transaction rates, large working memory, improved query performance and/or consistent response times. Zulu is Azul’s family of certified, freely available open source builds of OpenJDK with a variety of flexible commercial support options, available in configurations for ISVs, enterprises, and on-premise or Cloud deployments, as well as custom and embedded/IoT devices. For additional information, visit www.azul.com.

Zulu Enterprise, Zulu Embedded, Zulu Community, and ZuluFX are trademarks, and Azul Systems, the Azul Systems logo, Zulu, Zing, and ReadyNow! are registered trademarks of Azul Systems, Inc. Java and OpenJDK are trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliated companies in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

About Vitruvian Partners

Vitruvian Partners is an international growth equity firm headquartered in London with offices across London, Stockholm, Munich, Luxembourg, San Francisco and Shanghai. Vitruvian focuses on dynamic situations characterized by rapid growth and change across asset-light industries. Vitruvian has c.$6bn AUM and has backed a number of global technology leaders including: Just Eat, Farfetch, Skyscanner, TransferWise, Darktrace, CRF Health, WalkMe, Snow Software and Bitdefender. Further information can be found at www.vitruvianpartners.com.

About Lead Edge Capital

Lead Edge Capital is a growth stage investment firm with $2 billion of capital raised since inception with portfolio companies across the internet, software and consumer spaces – including Alibaba Group, Asana, Bazaarvoice, Duo Security, Spotify, Toast, TransferWise and Uber. Lead Edge Capital offers its entrepreneurs flexible capital and extensive domain expertise via its robust Limited Partner Network, a global advisory group of leading executives, entrepreneurs and dealmakers who have built and run some of the most successful companies. Lead Edge Capital leverages its LPs to connect companies with the customers, partners, talent and advisors needed to accelerate success. Lead Edge Capital was founded in 2009 and has offices in New York City and Southern California.