A Cloud Guru closes $7m Series A to boost US expansion

A Cloud Guru, a cloud computing training provider co-founded by Australian brothers Ryan and Sam Kroonenburg, has closed a $7m (£5.3m) Series A from Boston-based Elephant Venture Capital.

Headquartered in London, A Cloud Guru will use the funds to expand its content offering and boost its growth in the US.

Since launching in late 2015, the company says it has employees in Melbourne, Washington DC and Austin (Texas).

Ryan Kroonenburg, co-founder of A Cloud Guru, said: “A Cloud Guru was started because I couldn’t find high quality cloud computing training that didn’t cost thousands of dollars. Our mission is to make great cloud certification training available to as many people as possible. The very best content, at roughly the price of a movie ticket.

“Sam and I are delighted to be partnering with the team at Elephant,” he added. “We really love the passion Elephant shows in supporting founder-operated businesses, and Andy’s expertise in quickly scaling businesses is exactly what we need now, and will remain critical to our keeping pace with the ever-changing landscape of cloud computing.”

So far, A Cloud Guru claims to have delivered cloud computing training to more than 250,000 students in 160 countries.

Co-founder Sam Kroonenburg spoke about the company’s origins: “It wasn’t a grand vision: it was born out of necessity. We wanted to build the biggest cloud computing school on the planet. It had to scale to hundreds of thousands of customers, and we only had four weeks to get the initial platform to market. Using serverless computing technologies like AWS Lambda and Google Firebase we were able to build a massively scalable web site at a disruptively low operating cost.”

Andy Hunt, co-founder of Elephant Venture Capital, said the firm had chosen to invest in A Cloud Guru because “they’re destroying the existing technical training paradigm”.

“It’s amazing that they’ve figured out how to profitably deliver training of this caliber at a price that’s accessible to everyone, and we look forward to helping them reach their millionth customer,” concluded the investor.

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