It should come as no surprise that Cloud City has a proliferation of tech companies helping businesses manage the proliferation of cloud apps.
One of these is Azuqua, a four-year-old Seattle startup building software that allows businesses to integrate their various cloud applications to serve specific needs. The company announced a $10.8 million Series B investment Tuesday from Insight Venture Partners, which led the round, with DFJ and Ignition Partners also investing. Azuqua last raised funding in 2014, a $5 million Series A round.
The 45-person company is tackling what co-founder and CEO Nikhil Hasija calls the “fairly complicated problem” of knitting together cloud services in a way that is both scalable and customizable. Lots of companies are doing a version of this, from traditional enterprise application integration providers to light-weight connections made atop the “If This Then That” platform, Hasija says.
Azuqua’s offering taps into application programming interfaces (APIs) for each cloud service a business is using—constantly tracking updates and changes—to allow the various apps to communicate and share data. With that integration established, Azuqua enables automation to speed up business processes that touch multiple cloud apps.
Using a visual drag-and-drop system, Azuqua’s customers can create bespoke business processes, and manipulate and transform data across various cloud apps. Azuqua’s platform works with more than 150 cloud applications, such as Dropbox, Salesforce, Slack, and Zendesk.
For example, a company’s marketing department might track clickstream data in Google Analytics, but the engineering teams may want that data, too, to help inform product decisions. Azuqua lets the engineering team capture the same clickstream data, but presents it in the application of their choice—a project management tool such as JIRA, say.
Azuqua’s customers are using the company’s technology to increase productivity, improve collaboration among various departments, and reduce errors, Hasija says.
Competitors include Seattle-based Usermind, which is focused specifically on integrating cloud applications used by sales, marketing, and other front-office workers. The company hauled in a $14.5 million Series B funding round in early 2016.
And still other local startups, such as recent Techstars Seattle graduate VendorHawk, are trying to help businesses rein in and rationalize their spending on sprawling cloud applications. VendorHawk raised $1.2 million earlier this summer.
Azuqua has close to 200 customers in industries including finance, aerospace, healthcare, and retail, Hasija says. Marquee customers include Airbnb, Charles Schwab, and HubSpot.
Hasija says the new funding will support continued growth and hiring in sales and marketing, as well as continued investment in the Azuqua platform.
