The story
The name Joyent was coined by David Paul Young in the second half of 2004, and some early funding obtained from Peter Thiel. More funding was disclosed in July 2005 with Young as executive officer.
One of the early products was an online collaboration tool named Joyent Connector, an unusually large Ruby on Rails application, which was demonstrated at the Web 2.0 Conference in October 2005, launched in March 2006, open sourced in 2007, and discontinued in August 2011.
In November 2005, Joyent merged with TextDrive. 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.
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, leading to a focus on cloud computing software and services to service providers. Allen left the company in 2007.
Young left the company in May 2012, and Hoffman took over as interim chief executive until the appointment of Henry Wasik in November 2012. Hoffman stepped down from his position as the company's chief technical officer in September 2013 and took a new position at Ericsson the next month. Bryan Cantrill was appointed CTO in his place in April 2014, with Mark Cavage assuming Cantrill's former VP engineering role.
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. In 2009, it sold off both Strongspace and Bingodisk to ExpanDrive. In 2010, Joyent purchased LayerBoom, a Vancouver-based startup that provides software for managing virtual machines running on Windows and Linux.
On June 16, 2016, Samsung announced that it was acquiring Joyent.
On June 6, 2019, Joyent announced that their Triton public cloud would be shut down on November 9, 2019.
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On April 11, 2022, Joyent announced that MNX Solutions would be taking over the Triton DataCenter technology suite.
As of 2025, Joyent is an internal organization of Samsung, and therefore no longer sells cloud or IT consulting services.
Financing
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. TextDrive and, later, Joyent repeated the money-raising procedure a number of times in order to avoid the venture capital market and began to flounder, suffering from an absence of leadership and plagued by reliability issues, with users leaving for other hosts. Joyent raised venture capital for the first time in November 2009 from Intel and Dell. Joyent's early institutional investors include El Dorado Ventures, Epic Ventures, Intel Capital (series A, B Rounds), Greycroft Partners (Series A, B Rounds), 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 Telefónica Digital. In October 2014, Joyent raised an additional $15 million in series D funding from existing investors.
From Wikipedia’s article on Joyent, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4