He just sealed a $5.5 million round of venture capital, but last fall, Rich Wolski wasn’t even sure he wanted to start a business.

Wolski is a computer scientist who helped create cloud computing software called Eucalyptus. Widely popularized by Amazon, cloud computing means linking many computers over the Internet to handle tough tasks cheaply.

Along with a team of fellow Ph.D.s at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Wolski helped developed Eucalyptus, free software that lets any business bring together its machines to mimic the public cloud computing services available from Amazon and others. After publishing its research, the group got calls from big companies that were interested in using Eucalyptus and wanted to tap its creators’ expertise.

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