YellowDog Extends Funding to Fuel Global Expansion and Adds Former IBM and Microsoft Executive to the Board
Award-winning UK enterprise software provider appoints Reid Downey as a non-Executive Director and completes £2.5m funding round led by Bloc Ventures
LONDON, March 26, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Bristol, UK-based YellowDog, which provides high-performance cloud compute orchestration technology to some of the world's most successful entertainment studios and financial services firms, announced today that it has appointed Reid Downey to its Board of Directors. In addition, YellowDog has secured £2.5m additional funding led by Bloc Ventures, an investment company founded by industry veterans from ARM Holdings and Vodafone.
Reid Downey is an experienced senior executive in the international enterprise software sales market, including a decade at Microsoft leading software and cloud enterprise sales of Microsoft Azure and Office365 to Fortune 500 companies. His experience will add additional depth and insights to YellowDog's board as the company accelerates its global sales expansion with existing and new customers, particularly in the US.
The additional funding will be used to increase the scale of YellowDog's current rendering business and to further extend its presence in the financial services markets, building on its successful expansion into this market in 2018.
YellowDog's award-winning1 Cloud Orchestration and Workload Scheduling platform uses highly advanced machine learning (ML) to better predict the compute resources needed to execute complex computational workloads. More accurate prediction and scheduling of workloads, combined with intelligent orchestration drastically increases the efficient use of compute resources, lowering the total end-to-end marginal cost of compute, whilst also increasing the level of determinism for when workloads will be completed.
YellowDog's unique orchestration architecture not only reduces the cost of compute, but also the cost of the connectivity required to access the compute, something often overlooked when considering high performance computing in the cloud. Applications include optimised orchestration of both on premise, private, public and or hybrid-cloud compute infrastructure.
In situations where resilience of compute is paramount, such as in financial services, YellowDog's technology is capable of orchestrating workloads across a multi-vendor cloud fabric which introduces a new unprecedented level of real-time business resilience and continuity.
Gareth Williams, CEO of YellowDog said, "We are excited to welcome Reid to the Board and to secure this further funding given our tremendous year of growth ahead. With our recent wins in the financial services market and more in the pipeline for this year, we are only at the tip of the iceberg in this market. The funding will enable us to support our global customer base and extend our technology into new markets such as aerospace."
Reid Downey said, "I am pleased to join YellowDog in this exciting phase of its growth. In my time at Microsoft, we saw and helped enable the exponential expansion of compute resource across the globe. I have been impressed by the team and see strong potential for the YellowDog platform across enterprises in many verticals. I look forward to working with the team at YellowDog to execute this expansion."
Bruce Beckloff, CEO of Bloc Ventures, said, "Bloc has worked closely with Gareth and the team since our initial investment at the end of 2017. We have been impressed by YellowDog's progress in developing and deploying their technology into new vertical markets, most notably financial services. YellowDog is on track to become an enterprise software provider of global scale and we are pleased to support the company to achieve their goals."
Notes:
1. In October 2018 YellowDog was selected as one of Hello Tomorrow's 'Top 500 deep tech start-ups' worldwide and was further shortlisted amongst a select cohort of companies in the Data & AI category; In July 2018 YellowDog won the 'Business Innovation Award' at the inaugural Best New Business Awards in the UK; In October 2018 YellowDog was shortlisted for 'Tech Company of the Year' at the 2018 UK Business Tech Awards.
Contacts:
YellowDog - email: woof (at) yellowdog (dot) co
Bloc Ventures - email: info (at) blocventures (dot) com
About YellowDog
YellowDog is a global leader in intelligent predictive scheduling and orchestration software technology. By harnessing underutilised computer power and multiple clouds, YellowDog's Cloud Management Platform provides accelerated computing with unprecedented capacity, accuracy and speed to organisations that require greater computer power on-demand without fixed investment. With over 1,500 customers in 42 countries, YellowDog's technology is currently used by some of the world's best loved Media and Entertainment studios, by Financial Services organisations and is expanding into new markets such as Aerospace. Gareth Williams, CEO, founded YellowDog in Bristol, UK in 2015. YellowDog has been recognised as one of the best data and AI start-ups globally and for its innovation and has won a number of UK and international business awards in 2018. YellowDog's vision is to create a world where people do more, create more, discover more; unleashed from limited computing power.
About Bloc Ventures
Bloc Ventures, founded by industry veterans from ARM and Vodafone, is an evergreen investment company, not an investment fund. It invests in early stage deep technology companies and has been designed and structured to identify and build on compelling investment opportunities to create long term value and mitigate risk for investors.
Reid Downey bio
Reid Downey is an experienced senior sales executive in the US technology software industry, most recently at Microsoft where he was a partner and one of its top-100 executives. He was previously General Manager of Microsoft's Global Office 365 Sales force, and New York Metro Regional General Manager (the largest US revenue region for Microsoft) and led the sales of software and cloud-related solutions to Financial Institutions, Health & Life Sciences, and Media and Communications businesses. Prior to Microsoft, Reid Downey held sales management positions at Inventa Technologies and IBM. Reid Downey is currently a Limited Partner and Member of the Investment Committee of Cultivation Capital, a US based venture capital firm which invests in and develops innovative software companies.
SOURCE YellowDog
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