Cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean, which is competing against Amazon Web Services, has raised $83m in a new funding round.

Access Industries led the Series B funding round, which also saw the participation of its existing investor Andreessen Horowitz.

Andreessen Horowitz led DigitalOcean’s $37.2m Series A round in 2014. The latest round brings the company’s total funding to $173.2m, including a $50m debt financing round completed in December.

DigitalOcean will use most of the capital to hire new employees for the product engineering team, and the remaining money will be utilised in the construction of new data centres.

DigitalOcean, which was launched in 2012, provides cloud infrastructure for developers building websites and apps.

To date, over six million cloud servers have been deployed on DigitalOcean by more than 500,000 developers.

DigitalOcean co-founder and CMO Mitch Wainer said: "We are laser-focused on empowering the developer community.

"This capital infusion enables us to expand our world-class engineering team so we can continue to offer the best infrastructure experience in the industry."

Headquartered in New York City, DigitalOcean has data centres across the world.