DevOps-centric Puppet Labs closed a series E $40 million investment round, bringing its total funding to $86 million. The IT automation company plans on using the cash to expand globally and invest in research and development.

This should be the last round of funding before Puppet Labs makes a go in the public markets as the company should be cash-flow positive in late 2015, said Puppet Labs CFO Bill Koefoed.

Puppet Labs specializes in helping companies manage and automate their often messy backend infrastructure. For example, Koefoed said Puppet Labs is currently working with a big retailer that uses the company to manage its 7,800 point-of-sales systems throughout the globe.

Atlassian, Conde Nast, GitHub and Intel are some of Puppet Labs’s customers, among others.

Puppet Labs operates in the competitive IT automation marketplace in which legacy providers like IBM and CA do battle with startups like Chef and Ansible.

Recently…