Like a "cloud plumber", Dmitry Panenkov has come up with a technological solution that enables users to switch from one supplier to another depending on their context, environment or needs, thereby reducing technological and financial friction. Photo: Emma Technologies

Like a "cloud plumber", Dmitry Panenkov has come up with a technological solution that enables users to switch from one supplier to another depending on their context, environment or needs, thereby reducing technological and financial friction. Photo: Emma Technologies

Barely three years after its creation, and with sales expected to increase sixfold to €25m this year, Luxembourg-based multi-cloud management startup Emma Technologies, which is housed at the House of Startups, will announce on Monday that it has raised a further $17m, on top of the $6m it raised in seed funding last year.

More and more data. Data that needs to be accessed in real time and from anywhere. Which means more and more cloud computing. More and more cloud providers. And more and more need for a multi-cloud solution, so as not to be dependent on a single supplier, whether in terms of technology or sovereignty. It is on this wave - a market growing by 25% to 28% a year over the next five years, according to market analysts - that Luxembourg startup Emma Technologies is riding: its recurring sales have risen from €4m in 2022 to €11m in 2023, and should reach €25m this year.

So it's hardly surprising that investors are flocking to its development. It will announce a new round of funding of $17m on 25 November 2024, a year after having already raised $6m in seed funding. RTP Global Partners, which has been involved almost since the start of the Russian-born entrepreneur Dmitry Panenkov's venture, is contributing a further $4m, while the bulk of the funding is also being provided by an investor already at the table, Belgium's Smartfin Capital. Both investment boutiques specialise in tech and the early stages of development.

"As companies grow, they need the freedom to deploy on any provider, without limitations,” said the founder, a Bertrange resident awaiting naturalisation. “We are setting the standards to make operations cloud agnostic. This funding accelerates our mission to give businesses the control and flexibility they need to optimise all their environments”.

No-compromise solution

"By combining automation, cost visibility and actionable insights into a single platform, Emma offers a unique approach to cloud management, enabling businesses to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure. At Smartfin, we are proud to partner with a transformative company that is paving the way for smarter, more agile cloud strategies for businesses around the world," stated Harry Haeck, partner at Smartfin. Jelmer de Jong, CTO at RTP Global, believes that "more businesses are turning to multi-cloud solutions than ever before as they re-evaluate what's best for their workloads. Emma's holistic platform allows customers to create a cloud environment that best reflects their needs, enabling them to work with any provider and environment without compromise."

And 'uncompromising' is not a neutral term: Emma does not access or manage customer data, complies with GDPR and Soc 2 and, by design, offers a 'project limits' feature that allows customers and administrators to set safeguards on the providers and regions in which projects can be deployed. "Customers can select the cloud service providers and environments best suited to their data sovereignty needs, whether hyperscalers for non-sensitive data, European providers such as Gcore, Leaseweb with others to be announced shortly, or on-premise resources to manage workloads not suited to the cloud," said the company through .

On the subject of latency - a problem regularly raised by this type of solution - he stated that “Emma uses AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute and GCP Interconnect to connect to its own multicloud backbone network, a configuration that offers customers seamless connectivity between several cloud providers while considerably reducing network costs. For example, latency between nodes in Lisbon and Warsaw remains below 20ms.”

Research centre in Strassen

Customers can pay on a 'pay-as-you-go' basis, based on the consumption of Emma-based cloud resources, calculated on actual usage minus savings from implemented optimisation recommendations plus data transfer charges; or as part of the ‘cloud-booster' programme, with cloud credits from several cloud service providers and professional services support from Emma.

In addition to 15 employees in Luxembourg, the startup also has staff in the US (and a subsidiary), UK, Netherlands, Germany and Lithuania, and uses 40 subcontractors worldwide. The new funds should enable it to expand its activities in the US and double the size of its workforce. Luxembourg remains at the heart of its next steps, with the setting up of a research centre in Strassen, where premises have already been secured for this purpose.

From 2 to 6 December, it was invited by Amazon Web Services to its Re:invent event, which focuses on learning and innovation in cloud computing and is aimed primarily at developers, engineers, system administrators, systems architects, IT managers and technical decision-makers.

Read the original French-language version of this report /

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