7.24.19
Cloud Elements, a pioneer in API integration, today announced new strategic investments from SAP and ServiceNow, together with the appointment of Doug Gilkey as the company’s first Chief Revenue Officer. These moves, coupled with positive market response to the company’s launch of Cloud Elements 3.0, reflect growing demand from large enterprises, fintech organizations and software providers. There is high demand for an integration platform that lets companies quickly build, deploy and/or adopt new software that works in a “plug and play” ecosystem with other applications across business boundaries.
The new investments from SAP and ServiceNow close Cloud Elements’ Series C round, announced earlier this year. That round was led by Mercato Partners, with additional funding from existing investors Access Ventures, American Express Ventures, Grotech Ventures, Harbert Growth Partners, Rally Ventures, and Upslope Ventures. Total capital raised to date now exceeds $51 million.
“Building and running integrated business processes in hybrid and rapidly changing application landscapes need to become simple and fast,” said Achim Kraiss, senior vice president of process integration at SAP. “SAP Cloud Platform Integration Suite uses Cloud Elements as OEM technology to accelerate connectivity to third-party applications in a one-to-many hub-based integration approach. Customers benefit from significantly reduced integration costs.”
“ServiceNow’s mission is to make the world of work, work better for people. We do this by transforming old, manual ways of working into modern, digital services and experiences,” said Dominic Phillips, head of ServiceNow Ventures. “Cloud Elements shares a similar philosophy by helping enterprises and software partners simply and easily connect critical systems and applications.”
New Chief Revenue Officer to Lead Sales and Alliances
Cloud Elements has appointed Douglas Gilkey to the position of Chief Revenue Officer. Gilkey, an enterprise technology veteran who previously led sales teams at Epicor Software and QAD, becomes Cloud Elements’ first CRO and will lead the direct sales and alliances teams.
“Companies don’t do integration because it’s cool technology,” said Gilkey. “They do integration to get new customers, to increase their profitability, to improve their NPS scores. I’m thrilled to join Cloud Elements, a company that understands these fundamental customer needs and has engineered a revolutionary new platform that fundamentally changes integration to enable speed, innovation and greater market opportunity for its customers.”
One of Gilkey’s first priorities will be to optimize Cloud Elements sales organization to capitalize on increasing demand from software providers, large enterprises and fintech companies, the latter of whom are in the midst of a transition to “open banking” that makes digital ecosystem connectivity an increasingly urgent need.
“Whether we’re talking about the enterprise, a software provider, a traditional bank or a new fintech company, there’s more and more recognition that integration needs to go from tech barrier to business enabler,” said Mark Geene, CEO and co-founder, Cloud Elements. “Customers want and need to proactively manage their ‘digital ecosystems’ – their unique mix of applications and software components – to enable unprecedented collaboration with customers, prospects, partners and supply chains. The addition of Doug and the new investments from SAP and ServiceNow will help Cloud Elements accelerate product, sales and marketing initiatives to help meet this growing market demand.”
