Main Highlights
- SkyKick, a cloud automation provider, said that it has secured $130 million in an oversubscribed fundraising round, increasing its total raised to more than $200 million.
- It assists IT solution providers in growing more profitable cloud companies.
- SkyKick’s goal is to automate essential cloud workloads such as email migration, data protection, and cloud administration.
- SkyKick claims to have customers such as CDW, GoDaddy, Deutsche Telekom, and Intermedia.
SkyKick, a cloud automation provider, said that it has secured $130 million in an oversubscribed fundraising round, increasing its total raised to more than $200 million. According to the business, the money will be used to support investments in SkyKick’s platform, people, and operational initiatives in support, partner success, and partner enablement tools and resources.
Moving and managing the hundreds of millions of small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) that are adopting cloud computing remains an unresolved issue. In the coming year, service providers are anticipated to spend about 500 million hours on IT administration globally, an issue compounded by the ongoing epidemic as businesses strive to modernize their operations.
Based in Seattle, Washington, SkyKick was created in 2011 by two ex-Microsoft workers, Todd Schwartz and Evan Richman, as well as IT executive Brad Younge. While most SMBs were backed by IT service providers, the three thought that there were not enough internet telephony service providers (ITSPs) to handle the manpower necessary to migrate, secure, and manage all SMB customers in the cloud.
“SkyKick began by concentrating on the market’s greatest leverage point and biggest pain point — creating no-code and low-code automation solutions to enable ITSPs to serve SMBs globally,” Schwartz and Richman explained. They went on to say that the automation tools were quickly adopted by the ITSP community. SkyKick now boasts one of the largest bases of ITSPs in the world, with 30,000 consumers.
SkyKick debuted its technology for enabling Microsoft Office 365 migrations in 2011. Later, it introduced a backup service as well as QuantumSync, a technology that speeds up most migrations by two to four times while simultaneously enhancing security.
SkyKick assists IT solution providers in growing more profitable cloud companies. Its SaaS solutions and platform are meant to make it simple and effective for IT partners to migrate, backup, and manage their cloud clients. There already have over 20,000 successful partners and this number is rising.
Automating cloud tasks with SkyKick
If present trends continue, the global market for public cloud services is anticipated to reach $623.3 billion by 2023. In fact, Gartner predicts that infrastructure-as-a-service solutions such as cloud storage will be the fastest-growing area of the industry, with a 24 percent increase.
SkyKick’s goal is to automate essential cloud workloads such as email migration, data protection, and cloud administration. According to Schwartz and Richman, the business trains algorithms to improve these skills by leveraging a dataset of IT activities.
SkyKick, for example, assists IT partners in automating migrations to Office 365 in the cloud for their SMB customers. It also offers a backup service for Office 365 projects, as well as a cloud management service with security and compliance capabilities, as well as a connector engine that integrates software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps and cloud services into a single dashboard.
SkyKick claims to have customers such as CDW, GoDaddy, Deutsche Telekom, and Intermedia. It intends to add 100 more employees to its 230-person staff, which is distributed throughout Seattle, Sydney, Tokyo, and Amsterdam, during the next 12 months.
“Like other organizations, many SMBs were forced to pivot in order to respond to the worldwide epidemic, which included moving platforms to numerous SaaS and cloud apps. As a result of the huge rise in workloads, ITSPs became stressed, and SkyKick’s automation software became an even more mission-critical element of the ITSP toolset,” Schwartz and Richman explained.
They added that as a consequence of the epidemic, their firm increased considerably, and they were happy that they could assist so many SMBs to survive and even prosper by utilizing cloud technology during the pandemic.
This was the company’s sixth insider-led funding round, with new participation from Morgan Stanley (which provided both debt and equity) and continued participation from current investors Navin Thukkaram, Craig Nerenberg, Hawk Equity, Trebuchet Capital, Schechter Private Capital, and other technology private investors.
