Founded in 2009, CloudOn provides access to the productivity and collaboration tools required for devices. Headquartered in Palo Alto, the company has received a total funding of $25.5 million from The Social+Capital Partnership, Translink Capital, Foundation Capital and Rembrandt Venture Partners.

A perfect storm is brewing in the enterprise with the current waves of mobile adoption, BYOD and "consumerization of IT", each bringing its unique requirements to be addressed. This has created an opportunity for a range of point solutions such as MDM (Mobile Device Management), MAM (Mobile Application Management), Federated SSO (Single Sign On), Enterprise AppStores, etc.


The untapped opportunity is for new software services to focus on knowledge workers with an ease-of-use and mobile-first experience, all with the intent to enable a new wave of mobile productivity. Knowledge (or content) creation, consumption and sharing has been "stuck" in the PC paradigm for over 30 years. It is time to be unshackled and head into an increasingly mobile and social workforce, and not just through cloud-based file storage, but by bringing social context to content creation/consumption and enabling new models for sharing knowledge.


Mobile: The World in your Pocket


Mobile is by far the biggest disrupting force in the industry. With individuals carrying a computer in their pockets, in the form of a smartphone, phablet or tablet, there is a need for instant gratification when it comes to information. Over the past 30 years, the industry has consolidated around the Windows PC platform and the innovation was limited by the possibilities of the end-point. Now with a range of different mobile devices with different OS and a wide array of capabilities, innovation has been awakened once again, and it is refreshing to see old habits being challenged.

The near ubiquity of broadband networks (in most parts of the world), infinite storage and compute capacity in the "cloud", and the rich capabilities of the end points lay the foundation for new services to be rolled out and utilized almost instantly. Employees find themselves empowered to select their solutions of choice on their device of choice. This will fundamentally change how people work and boost productivity in an increasingly borderless enterprise.

Strategies for the GTM barriers


The cost to start a company and roll out a product has significantly been reduced, thereby creating an over-supply of solutions for any given problem. The challenge is now less about development barriers, but more about go-to-market (GTM) and overall distribution barriers. With some seed capital, one can quickly overcome the development risks and be able to roll out a solution. If it is a mobile solution, one has to now crack the distribution and monetization challenges across Apple AppStore, Google Play, and the plethora of new app marketplaces.

Since venture capital is the source of "oxygen" for entrepreneurs, the bar for Series A has gotten much higher as they are now expected to have solved the GTM and monetization requirements earlier in the life-cycle of the company. The funding chasm, which was traditionally between Series A and Series B, has been brought forward to between the Seed round and Series A. Hence there is increase in the trend of entrepreneurs picking one platform or OS to develop and focus their initial success and unfortunately for (Windows) Microsoft, it tends to be either iOS (Apple) or Android (Google).