Silicon Valley based, e-commerce cloud company, Webscale Networks, which has allocated an investment of ₹130 crore into the India market over the next three years, has raised $6 m, as a part of its Series B fund-raise from Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV), Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV) and Grotech Ventures. The company is in the process of raising a total of $10-15 million in this Series, a part of which will be invested in the India market.

Founded in 2013, Webscale has raised $20 million to date, of which $17.8 million was from VCs and the rest from Silicon Valley Bank. The company offers cloud migration, management, uptime, security and performance solutions for e-commerce businesses.

“We are in the middle of our Series B fund raise and have already raised a part of it — $6 million from MDV, BGV and Grotech Ventures. However, the round is still open and we are looking to close the fund raise at $10-15 million over the next few months, with a few strategic investors who will add long- term value to the business” Sonal Puri, CEO of Webscale, who is visiting India told BusinessLine .

Channel programme

The fresh funds will be used to grow the company’s fledgling Channel business, Event Marketing and R&D.

“We built our Channel programme starting June of last year and in less than a year, 50 per cent of our revenue is coming in through the Channel. Therefore, we are pumping in more resources into our Channel business rather than hiring a bunch of sales people and dialling for dollars” she said.

Webscale has signed up large distributors such as Cloud Distribution in the UK and Real Security in the Adriatic Region; and is currently in talks with a couple of large distributors in the India market. The company has sponsored e-commerce events such as eTail West and Shoptalk in California and Las Vegas earlier this year and is sponsoring IRCE in June at Chicago and eTail East in August at Boston.

“While we have started testing Google Ads and Email marketing, where we don’t know what exactly works, we found that the e-commerce events have been very successful for us. Our investments in R&D will continue to keep our solutions relevant,” said Puri.

In India, the company has moved into a new 6,500 sq ft office space in Bengaluru that can accommodate 70 and is looking to grow its small team of 25 in Marketing, Support, Sales & Account Management teams to 70 this fiscal.

Webscale processes about $5 billion in GMV for its customers across 700 of their stores in the US, the UK, China, New Zealand, Australia, India, Korea and Norway. A lion’s share of its customers are from the US and in addition to e-commerce which contributes to 90 per cent of its business, Webscale also serves customers in e-learning, financial services and media content.

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