Cloud Services announces Institutional Investment from BGF

Skyscape Cloud Services Limited has secured a £4m minority stake investment from BGF (Business Growth Fund) to accelerate its growth in the UK Public Sector market.

The BGF investment reflects the confidence that this leading financial institution has in the Skyscape business, which is growing at 20% per month with Annualised Monthly Recurring Revenue approaching £10m. Founded in May 2011, and to date supported by private investors, Skyscape is a leading provider of cloud infrastructure services to the UK public sector. BGF is an independent company established to help Britain's high growth businesses.

Phil Dawson, Chief Executive Officer, Skyscape Cloud Services stated “BGF is the ideal investment partner to support the on-going growth of our market-leading, assured cloud infrastructure business, singularly dedicated to helping UK government achieve their digital agenda; delivering better, user-centric public services through more affordable and agile IT. Focussed mainly on central government departments, supporting more than 70 projects, across 38 customer organisations engaging through over 100 partners, Skyscape will use the investment to enhance the capacity, scale and performance of our platform, extend our customer and partner care programmes, improve our SLAs and develop our Platform-as-a-Service proposition. Recognising the increasing awareness of the benefits of cloud services, Skyscape will also utilise the investment to accelerate our offering into healthcare, local government and research/higher education.”

James Austin, Investment Director, BGF commented: “We are delighted to be backing Phil and the team at Skyscape to help realise their ambitions for the company. It is a young business and one that is growing very rapidly due to its ability to deliver a unique cloud service model to a developing public sector market. The ambition of its founders is extraordinary. Skyscape has been built for significant scale, backed by a proven management team with very impressive track-records and a desire to grow Skyscape in tandem with the government’s policy for wider adoption of cloud based services.”

Capitalising on the government shift to cloud computing which forms a key part of its ICT strategy, Skyscape is a market leader in the provision of assured cloud solutions to the UK public sector and has made significant investment in designing a cloud platform that is specifically tailored to meet the needs of this market. Skyscape focuses on providing assured cloud services in an agile, secure and cost-effective manner. Its customers are able to eliminate the need for costly hardware or managed hosting services as well as benefit from simple hourly pricing and no initial set-up fees. This genuine pay-by-the-hour service delivers significant cost savings for Skyscape’s customers, who are able to turn servers off during evenings and weekends, or alternatively, rapidly scale services at times of peak demand.
Stephen Allott, The Government’s Crown Representative for Small and Medium Enterprises said “The Government’s IT strategy and the G-Cloud framework have been helping to provide increased access to SMEs, enabling them to compete for more government contracts. SMEs have won 60% of the business by value placed through the G-Cloud. Sales have now passed the £154m mark. This investment is a great example of government’s procurement reforms in action.”

Skyscape has achieved considerable success to date, winning a number of high-profile contracts directly with public sector organisations, including the Cabinet Office, Home Office, HMRC and MOD. Indirectly, via partners, Skyscape supports infrastructure hosting a large number of other central government departments, and a growing number of local authorities and independent government organisations.

The investment was managed for BGF by James Austin, Greg Norman and Edwin Davies.