Vates raises €30 million from IRIS and Bpifrance, and stays open source
Vates has raised €30 million from IRIS and Bpifrance, its first funding round after ten years of profitable, self-funded growth. The co-founders keep the majority, and XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra stay open source. Here's what the money is for.
Vates has raised €30 million from IRIS, through its Growth fund, and Bpifrance, through its Large Venture fund. It's the first funding round in our history. We've been profitable and self-funded since 2016, so nothing forced our hand: we chose to raise because we want to move faster than our own revenue allows.
Two answers before the details, because we know they're the first questions many of you will ask. The co-founders remain majority shareholders. And XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra stay open source, under the same licenses and with the same model.
Why now
Organizations want virtualization platforms they control, with predictable costs, real interoperability and the ability to leave. Broadcom's acquisition of VMware sped up a re-evaluation that had already started, and many teams are now rebuilding their infrastructure strategy around those criteria.
We've been building for that since 2012, and it shows in the numbers:
- more than 1,000 customers in around 100 countries
- growth of more than 65% in 2025
- 90% of revenue generated outside France, with North America close to 50% of our business
- 150 people and more than 2 million downloads
- a first appearance, in 2026, in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization Platforms
"We are not raising funds to change our strategy, but to accelerate the one we have pursued from the beginning. Today, we have the technology, the teams, an international presence and recognition from the market. This funding gives us the resources to execute much faster and operate at an entirely different scale, without compromising our independence or the open-source principles that have driven our success."
Olivier Lambert, CEO and co-founder of Vates
Where the €30 million goes
Most of it goes into technology. We're investing in the next generation of the Vates platform: performance, storage, security, automation and the management of large-scale virtualization infrastructures, including the new workloads that come with AI.
The second priority is international growth. North America is already our largest market, and we're strengthening our sales and marketing teams there and in our main European markets to work with more large enterprises, public-sector organizations and service providers.
The third is our partner ecosystem. We're expanding our network of distributors, integrators, service providers and technology partners, so that larger migration and transformation projects can be delivered wherever our customers are.
All three mean hiring. Open positions are on our careers page.
What doesn't change
If you run XCP-ng in a homelab, build Xen Orchestra from the sources or answer questions on the forum, you've seen this story go badly elsewhere: a company raises money, and a year later the license changes or features move behind a paywall. So here's where we stand.
Control stays where it was. The co-founders keep the majority of the capital, and the people who decide where Vates goes are the same people as last week.
Both investors are European. IRIS works from Berlin, Munich and Paris, and Bpifrance is France's public investment bank. Vates stays headquartered in Grenoble, and our software is still developed in France.
The licenses stay. XCP-ng is free software and has been hosted by the Linux Foundation, as part of the Xen Project, since 2020. Xen Orchestra is published under the AGPLv3, and you can still build it from the sources.
The business model stays too. We sell support and services around software that is the same whether you subscribe or not. That model has kept us profitable for ten years, and it's the model IRIS and Bpifrance chose to back.
"Vates demonstrates that open source can meet the highest requirements of the market."
Nicolas Herschtel, Partner at IRIS
"We were impressed by the quality of its teams, the relevance of its open-source model and the strategic importance of its technology in a key segment of digital infrastructure."
Cindy Ung, Investment Director, Large Venture, Bpifrance
What changes is the pace. More engineers on the hypervisor, storage, security and Xen Orchestra, and everything they ship lands in the open, as it always has. We explained earlier this year why open source is our continuity model, and every word of that post still applies.