CloudBolt to Accelerate Hybrid Cloud Management with New Funding

CloudBolt Software announced on Nov. 18 that it has raised $35 million in a Series B round of funding, to help support the company's hybrid cloud management and automation efforts.

The new funding round was led by Insight Partners and brings CloudBolt's total funding to date to $70 million.

This has been a busy year for CloudBolt. In June, the company acquired SovLabs, which develops codeless integration technology to help with hybrid cloud management. In August, CloudBolt completed the acquisition of hybrid cloud governance vendor Kumolus, further bolstering its portfolio. Overseeing both acquisitions was CEO Jeff Kukowski, who only joined CloudBolt in April but has been on an aggressive plan to grow the company, even in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

"We've had a lot of unprecedented things in 2020, and it has certainly been unprecedented in my career, where I still have yet to meet any of our team members or customers or partners face to face," Kukowski told ITPro Today.

The Challenges of Hybrid Cloud Management

Kukowski noted that every company has a different plan for their digital transformation efforts. That said, most large organizations are deploying applications to hybrid or multicloud environments, he added.

However, organizations face many challenges with hybrid and multicloud, according to Kukowski, one being figuring out the right DevOps processes and pipelines for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). Another key issue is security and having some form of integrated policy for regulatory compliance that spans deployment approaches. Cost management and optimization are also challenges that organizations of all sizes face with hybrid and multicloud deployment.

In terms of challengers to CloudBolt, Kukowski isn't worried about competition from public cloud providers, as the options they offer for multicloud and hybrid cloud enablement are limited.

"We do things very well that the public cloud providers don't do very well on their own," he said. "So, we're additive to their ecosystem."

2021 and Beyond

Looking forward, Kukowski said there is still integration work to be done to bring the SovLabs and Kumolus technologies into the larger CloudBolt portfolio.

"We are a company that continues to grow well, despite COVID, and we are investing in 2021, and going deeper with customers and partners in the ecosystem, to help meet more use cases and help our customers accelerate digital transformation, wherever that might be," he said.