China’s Cloudwise gets funding from Sequoia Capital to open global offices next year

China’s Cloudwise has secured funding from Sequoia Capital, the startup revealed today. The investment is worth US$15 million.

Cloudwise – which offers cloud application performance management (APM) and SaaS IT monitoring services for enterprises – currently has over 300,000 corporate users, up from 100,000 in 2012. While most of these customers are in mainland China, some are scattered across Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Europe, and North America. Andy Yin, the startup’s CEO, tells Tech in Asia that one of its most prominent overseas clients is Sky, the News Corp-owned satellite TV network.

Its enterprise customers in China include big names in tech such as Xiaomi, Sina, Huawei, and all three telcos.

The funding will be used in part to open offices around the world. Offices in Hong Kong and Japan will open some time in 2015, followed by bases in Europe and North America in 2016. Yin says the firm will increase employee numbers “from 70 to 150 in the next year, and over 250 in 2016.”

Cloudwise dashboard

Overseas expansion has often been a tricky business for Chinese tech companies due to concerns over privacy and security once data enters the legal domain of mainland China, where the government might access it. Yin explains that Cloudwise’s expansion will entail a “different policy” to accommodate overseas clients. “To win the trust of our customers, we are going to deploy the service in different locations. Since our service is built on the cloud, it’s pretty easy for us to expand our [server] deployment.”

Rivals offering cloud APM services include NewRelic and Appdynamics.

This is Cloudwise’s series B funding round, following on from the undisclosed series A from Gobi Partners in 2013.

See: Here’s everything Tencent invested in or acquired in 2014