Startup Spotlight: DigitalOcean’s developer cloud

New York’s DigitalOcean offers cloud-based app creation to individual, startup and SMB developers.

Operating on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, the company’s scaleable developer cloud runs the gamut from deployment, to scaling to monitoring, with 13 data centres worldwide. The company says no DevOps experience is required to use its services, vastly broadening the range of people for whom software development is possible.

According to Gartner, the cloud market as a whole is worth over $200bn, with future growth looking very healthy. ““Cloud services are definitely shaking up the industry,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “At Gartner, we know of no vendor or service provider today whose business model offerings and revenue growth are not influenced by the increasing adoption of cloud-first strategies in organizations. What we see now is only the beginning, though. Through 2022, Gartner projects the market size and growth of the cloud services industry at nearly three time the growth of overall IT services.”

DigitalOcean’s over 500,000 customers include the likes of Slack, HashiCorp, Splunk and WeWork, with DigitalOcean supporting over 100,000 developer teams worldwide.

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The company has raised over $450mn across 12 funding rounds since its foundation in 2012. Its latest Series C round, announced earlier this month, raised $50mn alone, propelling the firm to a $1.15bn valuation and Unicorn status. The round was led by Access Industries, with the participation of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

In a press release, DigitalOcean’s CEO Yancey Spruill said: “We are delighted to extend our partnership with Access and a16z and see this capital as adding strength to our balance sheet enabling us to better serve our customers’ demand for our platform, especially during COVID-19 where we are seeing an acceleration of businesses transitioning to the cloud.

“We are now freed up to focus on accelerating revenue growth, transitioning to free cash flow profitability in 2020 and positioning our company ultimately to be a public company.”

“We are excited about this investment to support DigitalOcean as it enters its next phase of significant growth,” continued Pueo Keffer, managing director at Access Industries. “We remain extremely impressed with the company and its management and believe that both are well positioned to transform the cloud space for developers and SMBs in the years ahead.