A three-year-old Fulton startup will use $9.5 million in new capital to expand its sales, marketing and engineering teams as it continues to experience double-digit revenue growth.
Cloudtamer.io announced Tuesday it has closed a Series A funding round led by Blue Heron Capital and TDF Ventures, with participation from Blu Venture Investors, Early Light Ventures and Gaingels. Cloudtamer.io helps customers with business management and reducing costs as they move operations to cloud computing services.
With the Series A funding, Cloudtamer.io has now raised $11.5 million in total capital. The company previously raised $2 million in seed capital after it spun out of Stratus Solutions in 2018.
Cloudtamer.io CEO and co-founder Brian Price said the company has seen double-digit growth in its annual revenue every year since its formation. The company started with eight employees and has since grown to about 50. With the new funding, he sees Cloudtamer.io growing to between 65 and 75 employees by the end of 2022.
"Now we think the time is ripe to double down and move into some new emerging markets for us," Price said.
The company has about 40 customers, mostly consisting of federal government agencies. Cloudtamer.io has started to develop a commercial client base as well that includes companies such as Boeing, Verizon and Indeed. Price said Cloudtamer.io is also looking to make a push with health care groups.
Price described Cloudtamer.io as a "very tech-heavy company" with the majority of employees working directly on developing and distributing its software. The capital from the Series A round will help the company grow its marketing and sales teams.
"We have a pretty lean sales force today and one of the things we're seeing is the cloud management tools and cloud governance tools market is pretty big," Price said. "It's in some cases confusing to the end buyer what one solution does and what another solution does and what those intersection points are. We see ample opportunity from the success we've seen to be able to double down on our sales and marketing inbounds to increase headcount in those areas and further expand."
Cloudtamer.io has ample space to handle the increased headcount. The company moved into 8,000 square feet in Fulton in 2019. Due to the pandemic, the company is moving to a completely remote-work environment with employees still able to work in the office if they choose to do so.
John Becker, a Blue Heron Capital operating advisor, and Lenn Kurtzman, chief financial officer of Reston, Virginia-based ThreatQuotient, will join Cloudtamer.io's board of directors as part of the fundraising round. Becker has more than 30 years of security, infrastructure, and technology experience. He previously served as CEO of Sourcefire before the Columbia-based company was bought by Cisco in 2013 for $2.7 billion.
The fundraising process was "different," Price said, because all of the meetings with potential investors were conducted virtually. Price said Cloudtamer.io received interest from more than 60 firms.
"For us, the hardest part was figuring out the right partners to help us along the way," Price said. "There is a lot of money out there in the investment community ready to be deployed. For us, the biggest thing is we didn’t want to choose firms that were huge where we’re the metric. We wanted to be a meaningful company in a portfolio of companies for an investor."
Tom Benedetti, managing partner at Richmond, Virginia-based Blue Heron, said he believes Cloudtamer.io is positioned well to help organizations as they move operations to the cloud.
"Unlike other cloud governance solutions on the market, Cloudtamer.io’s platform brings data that is scattered across cloud providers into one primary location so that organizations have a centralized view into their cloud usage," he said in a statement.
Cloudtamer.io also represents one of the first investments for Early Light Ventures, a new Baltimore-based investment firm that raised $17 million for a fund earlier this year looking to invest in "tenacious" tech entrepreneurs.
Price also said Cloudtamer.io wanted to work with firms that "bring more than capital." To that end, one of the firms Cloudtamer.io took an investment from is Gaingels, a New York-based company that seeks to influence social change through business by investing in the best companies that embrace LGBTQ leadership. Price said Gaingels will help Cloudtamer.io connect with diverse talent so it can reach diversity and inclusion goals.
