InterCloud raises €100m to finance its European growth

The InterCloud operator is giving itself the means to fulfill its ambitions. The operator specializing in the interconnection of cloud applications and managed solutions for multicloud resources (AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure, etc.) carried out a last fundraising round (Series D) for a very substantial amount: 100 million euros. It follows three previous ones in 2014 (€5 million), 2017 (€10 million) and 2019 (€22 million). The latter was led by Aleph Capital, with participation from Ventech and Open CNP. This brings the total financing raised since its creation to €138 million. “These funds will be used for the geographical extension of our services in the Middle East and India, but also at the functional level in network connectivity and security”, explained Jérôme Dilouya, co-founder and president of InterCloud. Currently, the company offers its services in Europe, South America (Sao Paulo), the Pacific (Sidney) and the Far East (Tokyo).

The company, which has a turnover of around €20 million and now has a little less than 90 people, will use this contribution to recruit around fifty employees, half in its sales force, the other on technical profiles. This reinforcement will mainly be dedicated to InterCloud’s activities in France, but also to strengthen its positions in Germany and England, as well as in new territories, Benelux and Nordic countries. “The infrastructure we manage is global with engineering, network connectivity and end-to-end encryption services,” continues Jérôme Dilouya. “We can develop them ourselves, rely on partnerships or, as we now wish, through takeovers”. Among the potential targets in the viewfinder of InterCloud: players specializing in routing protocols and DNS services for example.

A growth opportunity with the rise of the European sovereign cloud

For 2021, InterCloud believes it has had a good year, given a tense context, even if the recovery seems to be off to a good start. Thus over the past year, revenues have increased by 25% against 40-50% before the pandemic crisis. “Very large customers did not have as a priority to extend their intercloud services, others put their projects on hold or, like LVMH, carried out deployments according to the deconfinements in Asia, Europe and the United States. Without expecting to reconnect with the strong growth of yesteryear, the company nevertheless thinks it has returned to a very good business trend and is calm.

As a lever for growth, InterCloud could well take advantage of the wave of digital sovereignty that is making a strong comeback in Europe. “In the wake of sovereign clouds, the network must also be sovereign, either by relying on telecom and Internet operators in each country, or companies like us,” explains Jérôme Dilouya. “Europe has great ambitions of sovereignty, which must go through the certification of European actors to obtain a level of confidence at European level”.