KloudGin Closes $8.2 Million Round To Scale Its ‘Blue-Collar Cloud’

The startup founded by former Oracle executives is gaining market adoption among utilities and other organizations with large field service teams that need an agile, AI-powered mobile solution to manage remote services and assets.

When Vikram Takru left Oracle in 2007, cloud barely existed, and mobile was an afterthought, he told CRN.

In the previous decade he spent working on Oracle’s next-generation ERP solutions, Takru noticed that most business management products were built for white-collar workers—those sitting in comfy rooms with good Wi-Fi connections.

But in talking to Oracle customers, he saw the emerging cloud and mobile technologies could solve challenges for small enterprises with employees in the field all day, or working on the floors of factories, Takru said.

“That prompted us to build a cloud and mobile platform for the blue-collar guys,” Takru told CRN.

[Related: Oracle Introduces ‘Dedicated Regions’ To On-Premises Cloud]

KloudGin, launched by Takru and other former Oracle executives in 2010, revealed Wednesday it closed its Series A round of $8.2 million. The funding from Cloud Apps Capital Partners will go to accelerating growth across verticals such as energy, utilities, telecom, and manufacturing.

For those industries associated with large field organizations, KloudGin has established itself a popular platform for service and asset management.

“Those are the markets we are going after, verticalized, focusing on the field guys,” Takru said. “Hard markets to penetrate but once you get them you’re pretty much running their core applications.”

KloudGin built its first products entirely on an Oracle stack, but by 2012 realized that was the wrong approach. The startup licensed those initial products to Oracle and then started laying the foundation for a home-grown platform still closely integrated with Oracle’s analytics products.

Since then, market adoption has been driven by channel relationships—the bulk of the company’s revenue originates from regional VARs focused on the midmarket.

Many of those resellers are also in the Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite or Sage ecosystems, or even running older on-prem systems like QuickBooks for customers now looking to adopt ERP in the cloud.

Between the U.S., Australia, and Canada, KloudGin works with more than 30 resellers. And the company’s more-recent enterprise strategy has looked to global SIs that address specific verticals.

“Enterprise partners are very important when you start scaling,” Takru said. “We can’t just build a professional services organization. We need some of these larger partners.”

Those include channel powerhouses like Infosys. The services giant based in Pune, India has partnered with KloudGin to deploy a field service solution at a water utility treatment plant in Texas.

Senior Vice President Ashiss Dash said the KloudGin alliance allows Infosys to bolster its solutions addressing the needs of utility customers.

“KloudGin’s simple, intuitive interface for workers in the field understands that their work output is typically the first-line interface between a company and its customers,” Dash told CRN.

“They‘ve built a cohesive cloud solution around an interface that combines long and short cycle field management, asset management, customer portals, scheduling and IoT integrations into one SaaS platform,” he added.

Other partners, like Enterprise Solutions Consulting, integrate KloudGin into an Oracle platform to help customers manage their field organizations.

“KloudGin and ESC have the same goals in mind—how to make lives easier for everybody,” Valerie Ross, ESC’s vice president of sales, told CRN.

Utility customers often make big investments in Oracle and other major technology vendors, but only use a small fraction of those solutions.

KloudGin’s technology, which ESC has built into its Utiliprise solution for utilities, helps them get the most out of their spend, she said.

“A consumer is now able to get a work order, a ticket, much quicker, to get a field technician to their house, and service them effectively and safely,” Ross said.

That’s especially important with the Covid-19 crisis, as it allows those utility field technicians to quickly survey a house before they’re deployed.