Pensa, a Mountain View, California-based startup, emerged from stealth mode this week and launched its first product that it says can help enterprises spin up virtual data centers “within minutes.”

The startup is working with Nokia, which licensed the software-as-a-service (SaaS) and is “working on some production opportunities” with Pensa, said CEO Tom Joyce.

Pensa’s core automation technology, called Pensa Maestro, is a platform for enterprises that want to create software-defined data centers to run their applications. The first product on the platform is Pensa Lab, a SaaS that uses automation to help companies create virtual IT test labs before deploying applications in these environments.

“Customers are trying to build extremely complex environments,” said Joyce. “We can help with using intelligent automation that eliminates human error. It’s an intelligent test-lab-as-a-service that can design, build, and deploy for you.”

While it may take weeks or months to design, validate, build and deploy a new cloud-based application manually, “with Pensa Lab it takes 30 minutes,” Joyce added. The company claims the product can lower lab costs by 55 percent, design companies’ virtual environments three-times faster, and deliver applications two-times faster.

The cloud-based software can produce validated virtual data centers based on VMware and OpenStack. Pensa plans to add support for other environments including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Kubernetes.

The startup surveyed DevOps teams and found about 25 percent use VMware and 15 percent use OpenStack. “So that’s about 40 percent of the market. There’s also a large group using AWS and Microsoft, so we’ll continue to expand our coverage. But right now the bread-and-butter folks are using VMware and that’s where we want to start.”

Pensa's work with Nokia is targeted at adding scalability to infrastructure deployments.

“Nokia and Pensa have been collaborating very closely in 2017 to develop next generation service automation using agile and DevOps methodologies to help our customers build better and more flexible infrastructure to connect with their customers,” said Pieter Knikkink, portfolio manager for cloud services at Nokia, in a statement.

Joyce said he can’t provide specific details about the collaboration, but called it a “great relationship,” adding that “it’s large for us, a seven-figure kind of relationship for us in terms of revenue.”

Nokia “deals with a lot of large service providers, telco-class service providers, and they need to design these networks, and make sure they are validated and deployed,” Joyce said. “They are using our technology for that and we are working with them on developing large-scale production use cases. You can imagine a scenario where a small company in a test environment can use this [product]; if we can get it to scale to large-scale service providers, that is the Olympics of complexity.”

In addition to launching its product, Pensa announced it has closed a Series A financing round led by March Capital Partners for an undisclosed amount. Joyce did say the company has raised about $5 million to date.

Pensa was seed funded by The Fabric, an investment group that works with early stage entrepreneurs in cloud, networking, and next-generation infrastructure.

Pensa was co-founded by current CTO Ujwal Setlur, VP of Product Management Ganesh Rajan, and VP of Engineering Ramprasad Gopalsamy. Setlur is a former Juniper Networks VP of engineering and Rajan previously worked as a principal engineer for Cisco. Gopalsamy held previous technical and management roles at The Fabric and Juniper Networks.

Before joining Pensa as CEO, Joyce was global general manager of the Quest Software business unit of Dell. He also worked as an SVP at Hewlett-Packard and a senior director at EMC.