Two Seattle venture capital firms are investing funds in the Portland startups AppFog, formerly known as PHP Fog, and Cedexis.

Ignition Partners led an $8 million round in AppFog, while Madrona Venture led a $6 million round in Cedexis.

Both startups work in the cloud-computing space. AppFog is a young startup -- it was founded just a year ago -- that developed a cloud-based PHP hosting service called PHP Fog.

AppFog previously raised $1.8 million in a Series A round from Madrona Venture Group, with participation from First Round Capital, Founders Co-Op, and a number of angel investors. All participated in the company's Series B round, led by Ignition Partners.

AppFog said the funding will be used to expand its development team and "integrate broader technologies." Ignition also gets a seat on the board, which managing director Frank Artale will fill.

“The PaaS market is incredibly exciting right now, and while there are a number of new entrants, I was attracted to AppFog for its strong technical and leadership track record,” said Artale in a press release. “Additionally, their commitment and leadership in open source provides them with a unique position to provide a solid product and help drive a movement that will significantly benefit enterprise IT.”

AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson said one of the benefits to having Ignition's Artale on the board is his strong background in the cloud computing and open source space.

“Frank Artale brings a wealth of both enterprise and open source experience to AppFog, and will help to guide our strategy as we continue to grow our presence with individual developers and in the enterprise," he said.

Cedexis has a few more years under its belt, and an international presence. Founded in 2009, it helps companies in Europe and the U.S. improve the performance and availability of their web and mobile applications. The startup said it plans to use the funding to fuel U.S. market expansion and deepen European and Asia Pacific partnerships.

“The Cedexis team has built a foundational product architecture that enables many important applications -- from global traffic management and content routing to cloudbursting, CDN federation, multi-vendor cloud-storage, and application acceleration,” said Len Jordan, a Madrona venture partner. "We are impressed with the company’s revenue growth over the last 18 months and are pleased to invest in the company as it extends customer partnerships in the United States.”

Portland has been actively developing its homegrown software industry. Recently the city chose to invest economic development dollars in the software sector, one of four areas of focus for Portland. It's also working to rebuild its foothold in the open-source space after losing much of its growing open source community to the Silicon Valley five years ago.