Huddle, the enterprise cloud collaboration service, today announced that it has secured a $51 million Series D round of funding (Update – May 2023: The website seems to be out of use, and we therefore deactivated the original link). The capital will be used to expand Huddle’s leadership in secure external collaboration, by enabling enterprise and government organisations to simply and securely share, discuss and work on files in the cloud.
Huddle, founded in 2006 in London, is a cloud-based collaboration service that enables enterprise and government organisations worldwide to securely store, access, share, sync and work on files with everyone they need to – regardless of whether they are inside or outside of an organisation’s firewall. Built to support the needs of today’s workforce, Huddle is focused on secure, external collaboration.
The funds raised will be invested to continue Huddle’s rapid expansion in the US and Europe, and the company will also double the size of its product team in order to continue the constant development and innovation of the product. The financing round was led by Zouk Capital, with participation from the Hermes GPE Environmental Innovation Fund, managed by Hermes GPE, and all existing investors, including Matrix Partners, Jafco Ventures, DAG Ventures, and Eden Ventures. Nathan Medlock, Partner at Zouk Capital, led the deal and will join the Huddle board.
This year, Huddle has seen significant growth in its business, with sales to enterprise customers tripling in the first three quarters of 2014 over the same period last year. The company also secured seven of its ten biggest contracts to date in the same time frame. With offices in San Francisco, London, New York and Washington D.C., Huddle continues to strengthen its leadership position in the rapidly growing market for enterprise content collaboration in the cloud. Customers include Grant Thornton, Baker Tilly International, National Grid, P&G, Keolis, Williams Lea, Driscoll’s and Panasonic Europe.
Alastair Mitchell, CEO of Huddle, says: “We’ve seen the content collaboration market come of age over the last year, with enterprises and governments now replacing legacy software at scale and embracing this new way of working. There has also been an increasing trend away from simple cloud storage. It has become a low-value commodity and simply replicates the age-old problem of content getting lost and siloed on shared drives with a new one – content now just gets forgotten about in the cloud. Instead, business managers have realised that secure collaboration workspaces that enable teams within and across the firewall to work together on content is where the real value now lies. Effective collaboration results in greater productivity, supports decision-making, ensures teams meet milestones and ultimately drives business growth. CIOs are also recognising the strategic business value of content collaboration and, as a result, Huddle is becoming a vital and widely deployed part of their new cloud technology stack. We’re growing incredibly fast and we’re excited that we’ve been able to bring on board new investors to help us on the next stage of our journey.”
Samer Salty, CEO of Zouk Capital said: “Huddle is disrupting the enterprise technology space and transforming the way that teams and companies work together. On its mission to improve workforce productivity, Huddle has secured a strong client-base of enterprise and government organizations. The company’s impressive growth and customer credentials prove that today’s workforce doesn’t need just cloud storage, but intelligent collaboration tools that help teams get their jobs done. Huddle is a great example of a company that meets Zouk’s resource efficiency investment thesis: recognising that not only should we be doing more with less, but that resources, processes and systems are more connected than ever. We’re looking forward to supporting such an innovative company through the next phase of its growth.”
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