Nebula, one of the founding members of the OpenStack project, has announced it is shutting the business down.

The start-up said it “worked hard to explore alternatives” but the open source cloud market just wasn’t developing fast enough.

Nebulous

Nebula was founded in 2011 to bring the benefits of OpenStack to the enterprise. It was focusing on large private cloud deployments and developed not just software, but hardware too – like the Nebula One ‘cloud controller’ pictured above.

The start-up was co-founded by NASA’s former CTO Chris Kemp who helped build the original OpenStack software components at the Ames Research Center, long before they were given to the open source community.

And in the summer of 2012, eight key members of the Anso Labs and NASA team that originally wrote the key components of the OpenStack platform also joined Nebula.

According to CrunchBase, the start-up managed to attract at least $38.5 million in funding over four rounds.

Nebula said it was proud of the role it played in development of the open source platform, but disappointed in the slow uptake of the technology. “As a venture backed start up, we did not have the resources to wait,” explained a statement on its website.

From this week onwards, Nebula private clouds deployed at customer sites will continue to operate normally, however support will no longer be available.

The company noted that its products are compatible with other OpenStack distributions from the likes of Red Hat, IBM and HP, so the customers have plenty of options to take their cloud deployments further.

“We want to thank the incredible Nebula team that has worked so hard over the past four years. We would also like to thank our valued customers and partners for their support, as well as our world-class investors and board members,” concluded the statement.