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Scali AS, a leader in high performance clustering solutions, announced today that it has secured an additional $ 7.5 million in venture capital funding. New investor Atlas Venture led the round with participation from existing investor Four Seasons Venture. The new round of funding will be used to extend the company's presence in the US market, fund product development and continue to build relationships with key strategic partners such as Dell, HP and IBM. As part of the investment, Atlas Venture Senior Partner Alexander Bruehl will join the Scali board of directors. "The funds raised will be used to continue the execution on our aggressive expansion strategy and fuel the development of our products and services," says Bjorn Skare, president and chief executive officer at Scali. "In 2003, Scali successfully focused on commercializing our organization and products and building our international presence by adding three European and two North American offices. In order to continue to leverage our existing partnerships with Dell, HP and IBM, Scali will now intensify our investment and presence in the US." "Atlas Venture made the investment in Scali based on its strong position in the clustering marketplace," says Alexander Bruehl, senior partner at Atlas Venture and member of the Scali board of directors. "Scali has demonstrated the ability to deliver value to customers and partners and execute on its business model. We believe Scali is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the rapid adoption of clustering and grid based technology. We are excited to be joining the Scali team." "The addition of Atlas Venture as an investor in the company is a strong vote of confidence in the Scali team and their ability to be a successful supplier of leading software to the high-growth cluster and grid market," says Bjarne Lie, Partner at Four Seasons Venture and member of the Scali Board of Directors. "The funding enables Scali to pursue attractive opportunities and expand from the high performance computing niche market into mainstream enterprise data centers and further strengthen its global market presence." Scali continues to demonstrate traction in the Linux clustering market. In the first six calendar months of 2004, Scali sold the same number of licenses as the company sold in all of calendar 2003. In addition, the company proved their business model by securing a number of partner agreements. One of these agreements was the opening of the Dell Cluster Expert Center which resides at Scali's European headquarters and serves Dell's EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) customer base for high performance clusters. Scali also continues to close important client engagements in North America and Europe, adding to the existing customer base which is located in 24 countries.