NY’s latest star start-up lands $37.2M to grow firm

Meet New York's newest start-up stars.

Mitch Wainer, 28, and brothers Ben and Moisey Uretsky, 32 and 31 years old, just landed a whopping $37.2 million to grow their budding tech company, DigitalOcean.

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz of Facebook fame is leading the cash infusion, followed by IA Ventures, which led a $3.2 million investment in DigitalOcean last year.

None of the parties would comment on what the investment, announced Thursday, might mean for Digital Ocean's valuation. But the deal clearly inches DigitalOcean's three young founders closer to every entrepreneurs' dream: To grow out of startupdom in the time it takes most companies to turn on the lights.

Ben Uretsky, DigitalOcean's CEO, and his brother Moisey are from Brooklyn and went to Stuyvesant High School. Wainer grew up in Hauppauge, NY. The three men founded DigitalOcean in 2012.

Like Levi Strauss, who made it big selling jeans to California gold miners in the mid-1800s, the trio have positioned themselves to profit from the latest get-rich craze: mobile apps.

The SoHo-based company sells cloud hosting services to app developers, and it has grown to 180,000 customers from just 2,000 in January of 2013, Wainer, DigitalOcean's chief marketing officer, told The Post.

Services for app developers "is a really big growth area right now," said Michael Rasalan, director of research for Evans Data Corporation, which tracks developers.

Rasalan projects that the global population of app developers will grow to 26.4 million by 2019, up from 18.2 million today. That rapid-fire growth is being fueled by technology that makes it easier and cheaper to become a developer than even five or 10 years ago, experts said.

"The thing that just blew me away was the growth," said Peter Levine of Andreessen Horowitz, who will be joining DigitalOcean's board. "These guys have just cracked the surface of the developer community," he predicted.

For DigitalOcean, much of its attraction has been in its low starting rate of $5 a month for 20GB of so-called SSD server space. Competitors like Google and Amazon target larger developers and therefore charge much more.

DigitalOcean will use its newfound cash to add between 60 and 100 new engineers to its payroll. It currently staffs about 50 people, said Wainer.

The company will also buy data centers in the United Kingdom and South America. DigitalOcean currently has data centers in New York, Singapore, Amsterdam and San Francisco.

The SoHo firm is also on the hunt for a larger office space, said Wainer of the company's 5,500-square-foot Lafayette St. suite.

"We have a ping-pong table in the office and once that gets folded up and moved to the side, that's when we know we have to move," Wainer said. "Ping pong is critical," he added with a laugh.

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