OVH announces €400m funding to continue global expansion

OVH, a French cloud and hosting provider, has announced it has raised €400 million (£351m) to help follow through on its global expansion strategy, saying the addition of JP Morgan helped ‘reflect its position as a global player in cloud computing’.

The funding accompanies a previous €250m round from KKR and TowerBrook late last year, with the company saying it generated revenues close to €400m in 2016/17.

“This new financing provides us with an increasingly robust banking pool, renewing confidence in the group’s international strategy and positioning,” said Nicolas Boyer, chief financial officer of the OVH group. “We will continue to implement our strategic plan through international deployment, consolidation of our position in the digital market, acceleration of our growth among enterprise customers and by reinforcement and structuring of our organisation to take full advantage of market opportunities.”

The company currently operates 20 data centres across four continents, with more than one million customers worldwide. Alongside its European and North American bases – including Montreal, Toronto, Newark and New York – OVH has recently opened its doors in Australia and Singapore.

Regular readers of this publication will recognise the company from its continued impressive showings in reports from Cloud Spectator, an analyst firm which aims to rank cloud providers on both price and performance, from vCPU to memory and block storage. The most recent of these reports, issued last month, saw OVH take top spot overall, ahead of 1&1.

The month before, VMware announced it was to sell its vCloud Air business to OVH for an undisclosed amount. The vCloud Air US and European data centres and customer operations will be transitioned to OVH, with the rebranded service set to be known as vCloud Air Powered by OVH.