Seattle-based SkyKick, a young cloud-migration company, plans to use the money to expand its product development and grow from 70 employees to 100.
Seattle-based SkyKick, a cloud-migration company that works with Microsoft’s information-technology partners, has secured $10 million in a round of financing, the company is announcing Tuesday.
To date, the 4-year-old company has raised $17.2 million and plans to use the new funds to expand product development and increase its 70-employee team to more than 100 within a year, co-founder Todd Schwartz said.
“We are going to use the capital to hire more engineers, designers and marketers to essentially expand out our capabilities,” he said.
The cloud-software startup, launched its migration technology in 2013 to help thousands of IT providers move their customers to Microsoft’s cloud service Office 365.
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As that model progressed, Schwartz and his co-founder Evan Richman, both Microsoft veterans, realized their IT partners needed more support. On Tuesday, the company is also announcing the launch of two new products — cloud backup and cloud manager.
“We are evolving our company,” Schwartz said. “There are a lot more things we can do … this is the beginning of the journey.”
Schwartz said adding backup to a cloud-based service was a natural extension of the original migration product. Because human error is the biggest part of files being deleted or lost, having an easy way to back up and restore files was the logical next step, he said.
The cloud-manager product is designed to allow customers to keep information in one spot and quickly change settings for users, a procedure that previously could take hours, Schwartz said.
“We have built the perfect bundle for a partner to support their customers in the cloud and really have an efficient, successful cloud business,” he said.
With the additional funding, SkyKick also hopes to add more cloud services to its offerings. The company recently added Dropbox to its cloud-manager portfolio and hopes to eventually include Salesforce and Amazon Web Services to its cloud offerings.
As these large companies build their cloud infrastructure, Richman and Schwartz say there will be added need for a ways to seamlessly manage businesses’ entire cloud presence.
The funding round was led by its current base of investors, including Tim Ferriss, former Qwiki Chief Operating Officer Navin Thukkaram, as well as several private equity investors.
New this round was Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, former German Federal Minister of Defense.