$130 Million Financing for SkyKick to Accelerate Cloud Automation Platform

SkyKick, Inc. closed a $130 million financing bringing its total capital raised to over $200 million.
 
Demand for its newest product – Cloud Manager – has surged over 1,000% in the past year, underpinning rapid growth for firm’s other cloud automation and data protection products.

The market for cloud managed services is estimated to grow to $116 billion by 2025 at an annual growth rate of 13.3%.[1] SMBs are expected to adopt them at an even higher rate, driven by their need to reduce operational costs and streamline business processes. As a result, IT services providers (ITSPs) will continue to rapidly expand their cloud support and security models to meet this need.
 
As SMBs continue to adopt SaaS applications and cloud solutions like Microsoft 365, Zoom, Salesforce and Google Apps, ITSPs globally will spend an estimated 500 million labor hours on IT cloud administration annually. SkyKick is in IT cloud management and automation category, with a portfolio of products that are used by over 30,000 ITSPs, including CDW, GoDaddy, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Dustin and SHI. 
 
“We are still in the early innings of cloud automation in the SMB market. We’re excited to take this next step in our vision to build out the world’s most powerful automation platform for the ITSPs who serve them,” said co-founders and co-CEO Todd Schwartz and Evan Richman in a joint statement. “This capital will be used to fuel innovation across our entire product platform, and to accelerate our team’s efforts to empower IT partners around the world.”
 
As the cloud automation market evolves, ITSPs and their customers face challenges with security and operational efficiency. This is fueling demand for them to deliver solutions that use automation to help support customers, improve operations, and deploy more secure cloud infrastructure. The start-up will use the additional funding to continue to invest in product innovation across its platform, and to accelerate people and resource investments across sales, operations and customer success to serve a growing ITSP customer base.
 
“We are thrilled to partner with SkyKick and its outstanding management team,” said Hank D’Alessandro, MD, Morgan Stanley Private Credit (Morgan Stanley). “We believe that the company is very well positioned in the market to accelerate its growth trajectory and continue to innovate and serve ITSPs globally.”
 
This latest funding round was the company’s sixth insider-led round, with new participation from Morgan Stanley who provided a combination of debt and equity, and continued participation from current investors Navin Thukkaram, Craig Nerenberg, Hawk Equity LLC, Trebuchet Capital, Schechter Private Capital and other technology private investors. Brian Stengel, managing partner, Trebuchet Partners served as the exclusive financial advisor to the company.

[1] Market and Markets – Cloud Managed Services Market Report ($7,150, 164 pages)