First Cloud Platform that Combines Field Service and Asset Management For All Work

Andy Stinnes, Venture Partner, Cloud Apps Capital Partners, explains why he is joining the KloudGin board of directors and what the recent $8m in Series A Round funding means for the company’s growth.

As Venture Partner with Cloud Apps Capital Partners I am excited to be joining the KloudGin board to help further the success KloudGin is seeing to date.

Cloud Apps Capital Partners is an early stage venture capital firm and we focus exclusively on cloud-based business application software and successfully led the recent $8.2m Series A investment for KloudGin.  With over twenty years of operational experience in product strategy, go-to-market, and R&D, alongside my investing knowledge, I will be working closely with the KloudGin executive team to help build out their go-to-market team and further accelerate growth.

KloudGin has good synergy with Cloud Apps Capital Partners. We have more direct industry, operational and investing experience in building global cloud business application companies than any other early-stage venture capital firm. We focus on mission-critical enterprise applications sold to Line of Business executive buyers and had prior success investing in the field service management (FSM) and enterprise asset management (EAM) space, which we know well.

The FSM and EAM markets are large, multi-billion dollar existing software categories characterized by mission-critical, enterprise scale, operational business problems that I understand and work well with. The sector is dominated by outdated, complex, expensive on-prem and private-cloud solutions, now largely owned and maintained by large software vendors who are not innovating to keep up with changing customer needs. It is fascinating to me – considering that FSM and EAM are vital components in a business – how these clunky, old, siloed, manually integrated systems can become a ball and chain that prevent operational teams from doing what they need to do today, let alone planning for the future.

Today FSM and EAM have evolved as highly complex operations and the environments and business conditions continue to transform.

Customer demands are changing rapidly in terms of service KPIs, visibility, service window reliance, digital self-service and so on, and the solution needs to deliver this expected customer experience. Relying on patching together outdated systems with new ways of working and trying to make several different solutions work well together is difficult in two ways. First, it is an expensive way to work and secondly, and most importantly, working this way means that the systems have no flexibility at all. Neither of which is good for a business operation which by its nature needs to be reactive, dynamic, and efficient.

In addition, organizations that rely on outdated solutions will struggle to attract the best people as the new generation of engineers, service and operational recruits want to be working with the latest technology. A millennial’s second nature is mobile-first, easy to use, and intuitive software and understandably, they do not see any need to compromise on this.

The latest intelligent, IoT-enabled devices increasingly permeate asset networks and produce more, real-time data and insight that organizations need to have connected throughout their operations. And servitization of products creates new customers, companies who were once sellers of assets (cars, jet engines, robots) but are now operating their own assets to provide a service (mobility, propulsion, assembly). The entire end-to-end FSM and EAM solution needs to not only keep up with these transformations but also be flexible to serve the evolutions that follow.

This all culminates in a growing frustration with incumbent vendors which in turn creates a wide opening for new entrants. So when VPs of operations and field service hear what KloudGin is doing – being modern, built for the cloud, mobile and fully integrated all in one application, easy to use and flexible – they say ‘that is what I want.’

KloudGin has a highly experienced leadership team, led by the company founders who have demonstrated entrepreneurial talent and capital efficient management. They have extensive domain knowledge, great vision for where the market is going, and a thorough understanding of what customers need. From the outset KloudGin created transformative FSM and EAM technology that integrates seamlessly with an exceptionally broad and deep product footprint and extensible no-code framework to build custom applications.

A great product and a strong team are paramount. But the litmus test for investors is what the market thinks – and the traction KloudGin has already seen is very impressive. A high quality customer base has been established across both enterprise and midmarket customers across key verticals in utilities, telecom, oil & gas, manufacturing, and more. KloudGin is not on their own: they have an active and committed partner ecosystem consisting of both sell-through channels such as Sage/Intacct and their VARs as well as influencers in big five systems integrators like EY and many industry-focused consultants.

KloudGin has substantial and accelerating traction and revenue growth and their vision is to emerge as the cloud leader with the modern solution that will take this sector by storm and own this market.

It is exciting to see how this will play out for KloudGin and I am very much looking forward to being part of the journey.