Plutora was founded in 2012 by Sydneysiders Sean Hamawi and Dalibor Siroky to find solutions to the problems companies generally encounter in the enterprise release and test environment space. It enables them to simply manage their enterprise IT pipeline, enterprise IT releases and IT environments.
It does so by providing a unique enterprise SaaS solution that helps firms plan, manage, and control complex IT releases as well as test environments across their enterprise in a simple manner. The enterprise tech firm brings together everything necessary to operate resilient and scalable release management and tests environment management functions within large companies. Over the past year, it has seen significant market adoption, including large enterprise customers such as Barclays, Telstra, eBay, Verizon, Dell, Pepsico among others.
Plutora, incorporated in Australia, is now headquartered in Mountain View, California. To focus further on its global reach, accelerate solution innovation and widen its user base, it has raised a $13.4 million in growth equity from Macquarie Capital. This is the first round of external funding for the company which has risen its revenue organically over 200 percent year-on-year since 2013. Sean Hamawi, Co-CEO of Plutora, said,
Plutora has established a new category in SaaS solutions for the enterprise and our company’s impressive customer base demonstrates the strong demand for our products to support the shift to digital IT. This investment allows us to put the growth afterburners on and drive awareness of our tools.
Sean considers IBM and CA Technologies as their primary competitors but said they have a significant advantage over both due to its substantially lower pricing and ability to innovate at speed because of its cloud/SaaS model. Talking about the funding round he said, they’re stoked and went on to add,
We’re wrapping up the year closing the funding round, which took its toll on us, but we’re really happy to have Macquarie now on our board. This funding is about us getting ahead of the curve. We’ve been going through such exponential growth, we needed to take some capital on board to actually hire well ahead of the curve, so we can grow sales and marketing and double down on our innovation.
He also stated that the firm was well placed, given the need for quality management solutions is ubiquitous. While terms of the funding were confidential Hamawi said the economics of the deal meant Macquarie had first option to do the next investment round as well.
