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Say hello to UpCloud. The Finland-based cloud provider has secured €4 million (£3.4m) in a series A funding round, and is looking to expand its team with the proceeds.
The startup, which was founded in 2011, currently has four data centres in Chicago, Frankfurt, Helsinki, and London, and was recently named by Deloitte as one of the top three fastest growing technology firms in Finland.
UpCloud aims squarely at the ‘cost-effective, high performance’ space, and is naturally bullish about its funding and future opportunities. “Our goal is to offer developers the most high performance cloud infrastructure resources and the best tools to control and manage them on a global scale,” a blog post from Antti Vilpponen, CEO, and Joel Pihlajamaa, CTO and founder, read. “With the funding, we are able to accelerate many things towards this goal; opening of new data centres and offices, but also hire great people to our team.”
Regular readers of this publication may recognise the name. The company was ranked highly in a benchmark report from Cloud Spectator back in March, scoring 95 out of 100 and coming second only to 1&1. In comparison, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM SoftLayer scored 76 between them with scores of 27, 27, and 22 respectively.
How was this so? By focusing on performance as well as price, measuring vCPU, memory, and block storage capabilities, Cloud Spectator came to the conclusion that the smaller players provided better value for money. “When it comes to price performance, we see many smaller players find an advantage by offering high-performance infrastructure at a very competitive price,” Kenny Li, CEO of Cloud Spectator, told this reporter at the time, adding that he expected to see further consolidation, as the likes of Verizon, HP, and Dell, exited the cloud infrastructure space.
All good news for UpCloud then, whose aim is to become the ‘de facto global European alternative in the high performance cloud space’, according to the company.
The funding round was led by Inventure, a Nordic venture capital firm.
