Pivotal just raised $400 million more than anyone thought

Last week, Pivotal, the software and data analysis firm controlled by the storage company EMC, said it had raised more than a quarter of a billion dollars in a C-round led by the automaker Ford at a valuation of $2.8 billion.

Now it seems that Pivotal raised a lot more than that. As detailed in a filing that appeared Friday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, first spotted by Fortune, Pivotal disclosed that it had raised a total of $653 million.

The whopping difference: Pivotal's primary owner EMC converted $400 million worth of Pivotal debt into equity.

What's unclear is exactly how the conversion changes the ownership makeup in Pivotal, whose other strategic investors include Microsoft (which joined last week's funding round), the industrial giant GE (a founding investor in 2013) and VMware, the cloud software company that EMC also controls.

Spokespeople for EMC and Pivotal didn't immediately get back to us on this, but here's a logical way to think about it. With the injection of new investments from Ford and Microsoft, EMC wants to maintain its control of Pivotal.

As of March 31, EMC controlled 83 percent of the economic interest in Pivotal, according to its most recent quarterly filing with the SEC. The new investments would have presumably diluted its stake, making it the right time to convert Pivotal debt into shares.

Compare that to VMware, where EMC owns slightly less than 81 percent of the equity, but controls 97 percent of the voting shares. VMware's remaining shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange, and their value accounts for a good portion of EMC's $52 billion market capitalization.

Eventually, Pivotal is expected to float a minority stake of its shares — about 20 percent — in an IPO that would resemble VMware's 2007 debut. Plans for just such an IPO were on the drawing board as recently as November.

Of course this is all happening against the backdrop the massive takeover of EMC and everything it controls by privately held Dell in a $60 billion-ish superdeal that's expected to close sometime in October.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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