Atlas Cloud secures significant investment

Atlas Cloud aims to use a significant investment to develop its managed service offerings and support its medium-term growth ambitions.
The firm has secured a £2m investment from Northern Venture Capital Trust Funds (VCTs), which are managed by Mercia.

The North-East-based channel player has said the investment will help it increase headcount at its Newcastle headquarters by 20, taking it to 55. It also has ambitions to increase turnover from the current £2.5m to more than £10m by 2025.

The business has been carving out a name for itself over the past decade, building a customer base that includes an increasing number of users outside its native North-East, with half its revenues now coming from outside the area.

Atlas Cloud’s customer base includes a number of household names in both the public and private sectors, including Sage, Experian, Magnox and HS2.

The business has secured funding several times before, from North-East regional funds and private investors. Including this latest effort, it has raised £5.2m as it builds a business delivering secure and accessible hosting for desktops, graphic-intensive apps and complex databases.

The new funds will also enable the business to add more technology to its portfolio as it looks to deepen its relevance with customers.

“We promise customers that our cloud-based solutions work better than their traditional set-up, so we need to make sure we are at the forefront of innovation,” said Pete Watson, CEO of Atlas Cloud.

“The funding will allow us to fulfil our plans to become a leading national player in the cloud computing market by further improving our solutions and investing in emerging technologies such as Citrix Workspace and SD-WAN.”

Alex Wilson, investment associate at Mercia Asset Management, said it made sense to invest in IT firms at the moment given the important position they could develop with users.

“Cloud IT helps companies to achieve digital transformation,” he said. “Atlas Cloud has established itself as a high-quality provider, even for those clients that require the most demanding levels of service and security.

“We believe the company has excellent growth prospects and look forward to supporting Pete and the team on the next phase of their journey.”

One of the areas where Atlas Cloud specialises is helping users with remote working. Since offices started to close and workers were encouraged not to travel in to sit at their desks with the spread of cornonavirus, there has been a marked increase in demand for services in this area.

The firm also operates its own partner programme that enables resellers to take its hosted desktop offering out to their own customers.