ActiveState Buys Cloud Startup Phenor, Founded by Teenager

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How young is “too young” to found a tech company? ActiveState acquisition of cloud computing startup Phenor sheds new light on this question. Sean Michael Kerner reports.

Tools vendor ActiveState is acquiring cloud startup Phenora which develops a Perl cloud platform. The Phenora platform will complement ActiveState’s Stackato Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) effort which was announced in May.

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Among the many things that make Phenora an interesting company is the fact that is it run by its 15-year-old founder, Daniil Kulchenko, who is still in high school.

“From the first point we started talking to Daniil, we realized that his talent and knowledge were not bound by his age,” Bart Copeland, President & CEO at ActiveState, told InternetNews.com. “In fact, as we were negotiating the acquisition, he showed maturity beyond his years.”

That said Copeland noted that the only issue for ActiveState was that fact that Kulchenko is still in school, so he can’t work full-time yet. In terms of how much ActiveState is paying for Phenora, Copeland declined to disclose the acquisition amount.

As to why ActiveState is acquiring Phenora, Copeland noted that his company was interested in the technology that will help him get to market faster with a deeper feature set for ActiveState’s cloud offerings. He added that Phenona possesses a unique combination of talent and experience with Perl, deploying to the cloud, and running a service, all strengths that ActiveState was interested in adding to their bench.

“Stackato, our enterprise cloud platform, is currently in developer preview, so we are getting early feedback,” Copeland said. “What Phenona has built was not just a platform, but a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) as well, which includes a security and multi-tenancy model that fits well into what we’ve built, and will be able to leverage in our offerings.”

Read the rest about ActiveState and Phenora at ServerWatch.