Arrowroot Capital has invested $12.1 million for a majority interest in eight-year-old cloud management firm Embotics.

The company has previously raised about $20 million in three rounds, says its CEO Michael Torto.

With Arrowroot’s involvement, some previous investors have resigned from the board of directors, which will now have a new structure, says Torto.

The company’s multi-cloud management product vCommander competes against VMware’s vCloud Air and vRealize Suite.

“The reason why Embotics has done so well against VMware is its ability to provision infrastructure so fast,” says Torto. “And we compete with a subscription model where customers can pay an annual subscription fee.”

Embotics can get customers up and running virtual machines (VMs) in hours, because its vCommander does fast provisioning, placement, and reporting with one product. Embotics claims VMware’s products take longer for customers to deploy because of required training and integration. “We ride the coattails of VMware,” Torto says.

vCommander manages VMs during their lifecycles and dynamically places workloads on public or private clouds based on policies. It can also be decommissioned quickly, which is becoming an important attribute in the hybrid cloud world, according to Torto.

The vCommander multi-cloud management platform is sold to both enterprises and managed service providers to automate and control their cloud environments. It can integrate public and private clouds for hybrid architectures.

Named customers include service providers Charter Communications and Peak 10, as well as enterprises, including Nordstrom.

Embotics, which is profitable, is going to use the funding from Arrowroot to expand its sales and marketing. It’s also looking at possible acquisitions.

In addition to Arrowroot, the Invus Group is a silent investor in the company. Embotics says Invus is poised to invest substantially more in the next 24 months as Embotics scales its cloud automation footprint in North America.