Helsinki-based UpCloud raises €18 million to rapidly grow its team and cloud computing services

UpCloud, the Helsinki-based provider of cloud servers, has secured €18 million of equity and debt funding. The round was led by Connected Capital & Partners, a Netherlands-based B2B software growth investor, with participation from Finnish Industry Investment, a state-owned investment company, and Inventure, an existing UpCloud investor from 2016.

Founded in 2011, UpCloud serves small-to-medium size tech companies who need to run data-intensive software applications in the cloud. With its data cenres located around the world, the Finnish company aims to provide the right combination of high performance, user-friendly storage, affordable pricing, and helpful customer support.

“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,” explained Joel Pihlajamaa, founder and CTO.

The startup’s cloud servers, when coupled with MaxIOPS, an in-house developed block storage service, are twice as fast as the industry standard. Currently there are eight UpCloud data centres around the world: Amsterdam, Chicago, Frankfurt, Helsinki, London, San Jose, and Singapore.

Over the next two years, the company plans to recruit over 100 new employees and launch more than 10 new data centres across key markets in Europe, Asia, and North America, as well as new markets such as Australia.

“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,” said Antti Vilpponen, CEO.

Wim Haring of Connected Capital said: “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 SMEs.”