Chinese cloud server ops startup raises $9M as it prepares to triple revenues

ChinaNetCloud, a China-based startup that provides cloud server solutions, announced Monday that it has raised a US$9 million series A. The round was led by Juren Capital with participation from Jolly Capital – both Chinese investment firms in the Shanghai area. ChinaNetCloud says the funding will be used to accelerate the company’s growth and further tech development.

ChinaNetCloud calls itself an internet operations-as-a-service provider. It offers a range of services that include building new server systems, managing and optimizing existing systems, and building and managing cloud servers. It claims to offer one-stop-shopping so that instead of trying to build, manage, and scale servers themselves, companies can leave that work to ChinaNetCloud’s team all while paying what the company calls a relatively low price. ChinaNetCloud already has partnerships with a number of high profile web companies in China including Alibaba’s cloud computing spinoff Aliyun, and it claims to have seen consistent 50-100 percent growth in the years since its 2008 launch.

“This is a big deal for us,” ChinaNetCloud CEO Steve Mushero told Tech in Asia, “as we will double in size and triple in revenue in the next year.” Mushero also said that company was considering an IPO on one of the Chinese markets in 2017, despite the recent turmoil that has shaken investor confidence there. “China is still a good place to raise money, do business, and when conditions are right, go public,” he said.

ChinaNetCloud is not without competitors, but Mushero says that at the moment, it’s rare for ChinaNetCloud to run into another player who’s actually competing with it for a deal. At present, the company’s biggest competition is in-house IT divisions who prefer to handle everything themselves and are hesitant to turn their operations over to a third-party. Its battle to expand its market share, then, may not involve outpacing opponents so much as perfecting its offerings and making its pitch more convincing to win over hesitant potential clients.