SkyKick, which provides cloud automation software and services to Microsoft partners, raised $130 million in funding with plans to invest in improving its products and hiring 100 new employees across all regions. departments, including product and partner success.
This is the sixth round led by insiders at the Seattle-based company, according to a statement on Tuesday. Morgan Stanley provided a mix of debt and equity for the round. Current investors Navin Thukkaram, Craig Nerenberg, Hawk Equity, Trebuchet Capital, Schechter Private Capital and other private technology investors participated in the round. The company has raised $200 million to date.
[RELATED: SkyKick Accelerates Its Office 365 Migration Platform]
“This is an important step, if you will, that recognizes the value that MSPs (managed service providers) bring to the market,” co-founder and co-CEO Todd Schwartz said in an interview with CRN. .
SkyKick launched in 2011 with its platform to facilitate Microsoft Office 365 migrations. It later added a backup service and QuantumSync, a feature that speeds up most migrations by two to four times while improving security.
The company recently launched Cloud Manager, a no-code and low-code automation, workflow, and management application to administer and secure MSP customers in the cloud with the goal of saving MSPs time.
Sales of Cloud Manager have grown more than 1,000% over the past year, according to a company statement on Tuesday.
SkyKick has grown to 30,000 partners worldwide and 250 employees. Its clients include CDW, GoDaddy and SHI.
Schwartz said he and his co-founders started the company to bring enterprise-grade cloud tools to small and medium-sized businesses and realized the best way to reach SMBs was through the channel.
“We looked at the SME market and we thought, ‘Look, there just aren’t a lot of people helping SMEs,'” he said. “And when we even looked deeper, the heroes, the unsung heroes of the SMB market, were MSPs. And when we looked at that market, there were even fewer companies that served MSPs, and even fewer that were 100% focused on MSPs, so for us, we saw a tremendous opportunity to help MSP find a set of customers that we thought would need help.”
SkyKick’s offerings include automations for Microsoft 365 migrations from on-premises Exchange and Google, cloud backup for M365 and SharePoint, and unlimited, free technical support, according to its website. The basic SkyKick plan starts at $199 per month if partners pay for the year.
Company executives credit the pandemic for attracting more SMBs to the cloud and interest in adopting more cloud tools for businesses. Rising SMB adoption also means an increased need for solution providers who can educate SMBs on choosing the right tools and managing cloud services for them.
And, in turn, a greater need for automation software vendors like SkyKick that work with MSPs to save solution providers from having to retrain existing employees or hire new ones, executives said at CRN.
“They just had this wave and wave of their customers who might have moved a little slower, they thought they had plenty of time,” SkyKick co-founder and co-CEO Evan Richman said. to CRN in an interview. “And then all of a sudden, they moved in. And I think as they move, whether it’s Teams, whatever collaboration tools or email, you’ve taken that first step into the cloud. And you start thinking about other things you can do in the cloud.
“The cloud is just getting started,” Schwartz said. “It’s a $100 billion MSP market. There’s a lot of business happening and it’s growing in double digits. And this is accelerating with the proliferation of SaaS. And yet if you look at penetration, most organizations only have one or two apps, and yet you look at the average enterprise and they have 30 apps. So we see the trend, and the complexity will increase. So we think the cloud is still in its infancy in the SMB market. »
