“We are very excited to be the lead investor in this expansion financing round for UpCloud. Connected was immediately impressed by the quality of the UpCloud team. In our view UpCloud is well positioned to further develop & expand its software services and capture a sizable part in the global market of business-critical hosting for technically savvy SME’s”, says Wim Haring of Connected Capital.
“UpCloud has grown profitably for many years now. This investment enables fast international expansion to new growing markets such as Asia and India. Software and data processing are rapidly moving to cloud services so UpCloud’s services will have a strong demand in the future as well. UpCloud’s objective is to be a globally leading European choice in the cloud infrastructure space for small and medium size businesses. It’s great to work together with UpCloud as they continue to exceed customer expectations on performance and customer support, which will continue to drive the business.”, says Keith Bonnici, Investment Director, Finnish Industry Investment Venture Capital Team
Performance is the factor that makes UpCloud unique among its competitors
Formed in 2011, UpCloud offers cost-effective and high-performance cloud computing from its eight global data centres located in Amsterdam, Chicago, Frankfurt, Helsinki, London, San Jose and Singapore – with more new regions under way.
Typical UpCloud customers are small-to-medium size tech companies that need to run business critical (data intensive) software applications in the cloud. For this they require high performance computing capacity, storage and connectivity which is user friendly, attractively priced and meets their customer service requirements. Customers have a fully web-based interface to on-board, manage, customize network (SDN), pay and monitor their cloud services, usage and security.
UpCloud’s proprietary cloud storage technology, MaxIOPS, offers better performance, improved redundancy and overall value for its customers. In Europe, UpCloud has repeatedly been recognized as the performance leader in the infrastructure space by independent market research company CloudSpectator. The growth investment will be used to grow the sales and marketing teams, deepen and expand the server network and to expand the technology teams to further develop new software-based product features and to stay ahead with performance.
At the moment, UpCloud employs more than 50 employees in Finland, UK, Germany, Singapore and the USA.
“We are thrilled to be able to accelerate our hiring dramatically and we will be looking to double our team size in just this year. We’ve worked hard to build a culture that is very different from other companies, highlighted by strong internal employee metrics, showing our team is energised and committed to UpCloud’s long term success. We’ve worked equally hard in offering a great customer experience which is shown in our NPS scores which are consistently industry leading at around 60. This is a great time to further speed up our growth“, says Antti Vilpponen, CEO UpCloud.
Joel Pihlajamaa, UpCloud’s Founder and CTO, continues, “UpCloud’s roots go back to 2009 when cloud infrastructure services had just been launched. The hourly pricing disrupted the market, but technically the services were poor, performance varied highly, and proper redundancy was lacking. UpCloud was founded on the principle of high performance and redundancy at the core and at a price that even an independent developer could afford the services. Now 10 years later it is easy to look back and say that our ambitious take on R&D in high performance has paid off!”
More information
UpCloud, CEO Antti Vilpponen, antti.vilpponen@upcloud.com
Tesi, Investment Director Keith Bonnici, puh. +358 40 179 9584, keith.bonnici@tesi.fi)
About UpCloud – Never become yet another.
UpCloud is a European cloud service provider offering the world’s fastest cloud servers on an hourly billed infrastructure-as-a-service from its eight data centres in Amsterdam, Chicago, Frankfurt, Helsinki, London, San Jose, and Singapore. We are headquartered in Helsinki, Finland.
We have been recognized twice as the #1 Performance Leader among the top 10 Cloud Hosting Providers in Europe by Cloud Spectator. We take massive pride in having the most talented and most motivated team of experts who are passionate about everything we do. We aim to create those magic moments, where genius and hard work meet. https://upcloud.com
About Connected Capital
Connected Capital is an investment company based in Amsterdam, with a focus on investing in European companies offering differentiating SaaS solutions for the business market. Connected Capital offers both capital and intensive support in making strategic choices and realizing international growth. Connected Capital has a professional and complementary team of experienced professionals, with a background in M&A, private equity, strategy consulting, as well as years of experience in accelerating growth for scale-ups. The current portfolio consists of investments in Omnia Retail, iWelcome, Speakap, Concentra, Foleon, and Channelsight.
About Finnish Industry Investment
Tesi (Finnish Industry Investment Ltd) is a state-owned investment company that wants to raise Finland to the front ranks of renewing economic growth by investing in funds and directly in companies. We invest profitably and responsibly, together with co-investors, to create the world’s new success stories. Our investments under management total 1.2 billion euros. Ambition for ownership and success www.tesi.fi | @TesiFII
About Inventure
Inventure is a leading early-stage venture capital firm in the Nordic and Baltic countries. Inventure invests in innovative and fast-growing companies with strong leadership and the goal of disruption in their field. Inventure employs experienced investors, experts and investment professionals with the common goal of building start-up global success stories. Inventure operates in Helsinki and Stockholm. www.inventure.vc