As with all start-ups, especially for a cloud provider, access to funds is imperative to build and scale quickly – after all building out new data centre regions doesn't come cheap! So in recent months we quietly opened a seed round to acquire $2.8m worth of funding – giving Civo a pre-money valuation of $16,800,000.

Since launching into beta nearly 2 years ago, we’ve had tons of VC companies knocking on our door, but at this stage we decided not to take VC money. This seems a departure from the norm nowadays, but for me it was vital that we stay true to our vision. We want to be able to freely focus on our roadmap, without any potential distractions or interference that can sometimes be associated with VC money.

I fully appreciate the VCs have an important role to play and many are supportive of existing management teams, but likewise I’ve also heard some horror stories. So for the early stage of our growth we chose not to go down this route.

So instead we set about finding private investors to bring onboard to ensure we can stay fully focussed on our vision. To our delight we had no problem finding the right people who believed in what we’re building and recognised our potential for rapid growth – even if we did have some tricky moments trying to explain exactly what containerisation and Kubernetes is!

Importantly, none of these private investors have a seat on the board, nor do they have the ability to influence our roadmap or decision making. They are simply people who believe in what we’re doing and are excited to watch us grow without being directly involved.

However, there was a twist in the plot we didn’t see coming…

As mentioned we set out to raise $2.8m for our seed round, but along this journey an immense opportunity presented itself - one we simply could not ignore. This news, which we cannot formally announce just yet, will bring us up to the $2.8m funding we set out to achieve in the first place, thus ending our seed round.

For now though it’s our pleasure to formally announce we’ve fully secured $840,000 as part of phase one and we’re thrilled to bring along our new friends with us on our journey. As for the remaining $1.96m, we’re super excited to announce the details of this as soon we’re allowed to.

In total this investment in Civo will allow us to rapidly scale globally, even further than the original four regions we had planned for this year, as well as creating new opportunities for us bring more amazing talent into the team, and expand our feature set.

If you’re curious about what we have planned for the rest of the year, see our community-driven 2021 roadmap – but it’s unlikely we’ll stop there after these recent developments.

Stay tuned for our next funding update in the coming weeks!