Vates raises €30m from IRIS and Bpifrance, its first outside round

Vates raises €30m from IRIS and Bpifrance, its first outside round

6 October 2026: Vates, the French company behind the XCP-ng hypervisor and the Xen Orchestra management console, has raised €30 million from IRIS, through its Growth fund, and Bpifrance, through its Large Venture fund. It is the first funding round in the company's history.

Vates says it has been profitable and self-funded since 2016 and chose to raise to grow faster than its own revenue allows. The co-founders remain majority shareholders, and the company says XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra keep their current licences. Xen Orchestra is published under the AGPLv3, and XCP-ng has been hosted by the Linux Foundation as part of the Xen Project since 2020.

The company gives these figures for its position: more than 1,000 customers in around 100 countries, growth of more than 65% in 2025, 90% of revenue earned outside France with North America close to half of the business, 150 staff and more than two million downloads. It also says it appeared for the first time in 2026 in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization Platforms. Vates links the demand to Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, which it says sped up a re-evaluation of virtualisation platforms among teams that want predictable costs and the ability to leave.

Most of the money goes into technology: performance, storage, security, automation and the management of large virtualisation estates, including the workloads that come with AI. Second comes sales and marketing in North America and the main European markets, aimed at large enterprises, public-sector bodies and service providers. Third is the partner network of distributors, integrators and service providers, so that larger migration projects can be delivered locally. All three involve hiring.

"We are not raising funds to change our strategy, but to accelerate the one we have pursued from the beginning," said Olivier Lambert, CEO and co-founder of Vates. Nicolas Herschtel, partner at IRIS, said Vates "demonstrates that open source can meet the highest requirements of the market."

Vates is headquartered in Grenoble, and both investors are European: IRIS works from Berlin, Munich and Paris, and Bpifrance is France's public investment bank. The company says it still sells support and services around software that is identical whether or not a customer subscribes.

Company profile on TrustList: Vates

Sources

• Vates: Vates raises €30 million from IRIS and Bpifrance, and stays open source, 6 October 2026
• Tech.eu: IRIS and Bpifrance back Vates with €30M for global expansion, 6 October 2026