Lemongrass Consulting, a SAP and AWS consultant based in the United Kingdom, has announced plans to establish its U.S. headquarters in Atlanta following a $10 million Series C raise. The round was led by Blue Lagoon Capital and joined by returning investor Columbia Capital.
Lemongrass CEO Michael Rosenbloom told Atlanta Inno the firm will establish their local headquarters this summer, with a target for July. The funding will primarily be used to build out the executive management team, grow sales and marketing, accelerate the development of the MiCloud software platform and to grow the company's footprint in the U.S. and other markets, he said.
"Lemongrass will be hiring almost 200 new resources in 2020 and plans to open a U.S. headquarters in Atlanta in the summer of this year, adding a number of jobs in the local community," he said. "Our CEO and soon to be named CTO both reside in the greater Atlanta area already and we expect to add technology professionals such as technical architects, SAP and AWS infrastructure engineers, sales and marketing resources and support personnel."
Lemongrass specializes in the implementation, migration, operation, innovation and automation of SAP on AWS, covering both the SAP Business Suite and Business One, Rosenbloom said. SAP is a complicated software product that often proves difficult to migrate to the cloud.
"Most companies now embrace public cloud hyperscalers but do not necessarily know how to move their mission critical SAP workloads there. AWS is the leading cloud service provider and why Lemongrass chose to exclusively support SAP on AWS," he said. "We were the first to move production SAP workloads to AWS around 10 years ago and (we have) the most resources in the world with deep SAP on AWS skills. Finally, our proprietary software product, MiCloud, brings unmatched innovation and automation to both migration projects as well as ongoing run operations and that differentiates our services to enable our clients to reduce cost, increase speed and agility and ultimately to innovate in their own businesses."
Rosenbloom said Blue Lagoon Capital joined the round because of its extensive experience with SAP dating back to the early 1990’s. BLC founded Virtustream, the first cloud service provider focused on mission critical enterprise workloads such as SAP and within 7 years sold the business to EMC for over $1.2 billion, he said.
"Their proven track record in growing an IP enabled services business like Lemongrass and their expansive network in the industry will greatly help us achieve our objectives for our clients, employees and investors," he said.
To date, Lemongrass has raised $29.3 million in funding and employs approximately 250 people.
