Nerdio and its MSP partners continue to see ‘a massive wave of Citrix and Omnissa customers and partners looking for another solution,’ CRO Joseph Landes tells CRN.
Nerdio, the provider of an automated end-user computing platform that helps solution providers with Microsoft cloud deployments and management, has secured a $500 million Series C investment to innovate its products and grow geographically.
Joseph Landes, chief revenue officer of the Chicago-based vendor, told CRN in an interview that the funds come as Nerdio and its MSP partners continue to see “a massive wave of Citrix and Omnissa (the spin-out of VMware’s EUC business) customers and partners looking for another solution” after pricing and licensing changes at the legacy virtualization vendors.
End users looking to leave on-premises virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and move to Microsoft cloud and more modern desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offers “has been and will continue to be just a great tailwind for our business” as more Citrix and Omnissa customer renewal dates come up, Landes said.
[RELATED: Nerdio CRO Landes Says New Pricing Model Is Taking Off]
Nerdio Series C
Citrix executives have told CRN that the virtualization and cloud vendor has seen success going deeper with existing customers and bringing more business to its existing partners.
Citrix executives have said that factors including its end-to-end platform, the mission-critical workloads on the vendor’s technologies and time needed to execute a migration give it the incumbency edge over various VDI and DaaS vendors trying to win over Citrix customers.
Landes told CRN that the migration from legacy vendors is very doable. “Everyone’s looking at making the move, it’s just how quickly it can happen,” he said.
With economists from the likes of JPMorgan and Moody’s Analytics raising recession probability rates over reciprocal tariffs, slowing immigration and mass federal layoffs, according to Fortune, Nerdio’s wares and moving to the cloud should resonate with customers focused on cost cutting.
Landes shared the story of a large enterprise that went down from a 35-person managed on-premises legacy environment to four managers with Nerdio.
“Some of the real core value that we add is in helping organizations save money on their Azure costs on Azure compute and storage,” Landes said. “There’s hard costs that are saved, but then there are also things like labor costs and the ability to do things with fewer people and faster.”
The investment puts Nerdio’s valuation at more than $1 billion, quadrupling the amount two years ago, according to the vendor.
“We’re going to use the money to continue delighting our partners and delighting our clients and them,” Landes said. “It’s validation that our bet on empowering MSPs to build successful cloud practices using the Microsoft Cloud is something that has worked well and that others believe in.”
General Atlantic provided the minority investment, with participation from Lead Edge Capital and StepStone.
Nerdio is up to 5 million-plus users across 15,000 customers and 50 countries, according to the vendor. The company is profitable, with 85 percent annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth year over year and influencing more than $350 million of Microsoft revenue.
Recent product enhancements for the vendor’s wares include new Microsoft 365 management capabilities for Nerdio Manager for MSP, application delivery enhancements and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
Over the years, Nerdio has expanded its tools to work with more Microsoft products including Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Intune, Defender and Entra ID (the former Azure Active Directory).
Part of the new investment will help Nerdio grow overseas in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia-Pacific (APAC).
Other technology investments by General Atlantic include Odoo, JumpCloud, Threatlocker, Vast and Devo.
Lead Edge Capital investments include Asana, Uber, Zoom, TikTok owner ByteDance, Grafana Labs and LaunchDarkly.
