Google Cloud Partner CloudWerx Nabs Microsoft Exec As CTO
Google Cloud Premier Partner CloudWerx has nabbed Microsoft’s former director of product incubation following a ‘fearless female funding’ round of financing, enabling the startup to hire top-notch talent and add people to its engineering team and sales force.
Fast-growing Google Cloud partner CloudWerx has hired former Microsoft director Sidhant Gupta as its new CTO, following a successful “fearless female funding” round of financing, said CloudWerx co-founder Betsy Reed.
“Sidhant Gupta is absolutely incredible,” Reed, CloudWerx vice president and CRO, told CRN. “We’re so happy and thankful he joined us. … He’s a one-of-a-kind technical talent and incredible leader.”
Gupta recently left Microsoft as the company’s director of product incubation, tasked with bringing innovative health and life sciences incubations to the market. He spent nearly nine years at Microsoft, including as a strategy adviser helping craft Microsoft’s digital health-care innovation pipeline and strategy.
Gupta said he’s excited to join the Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup, which already has more than 200 customers, along with a 100 percent customer retention rate.
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“My key responsibility will be to build out a world-class engineering team that is customer-obsessed and is always in a learning mode, willing to take on the next tough challenge, and delivering solutions faster than anyone else,” Gupta said on LinkedIn, adding that he wanted to thank Microsoft and the people who mentored him.
Gupta will supervise the various specialized cloud engineering teams at CloudWerx. He also will manage the day-to-day functions as well as contributing to long-term planning with senior leadership to ensure growth in intellectual property development.
“Cloudwerx’s sales and business leadership is exceptional and brings an intense sense of urgency and commitment to delivering the best outcomes for its customers at a fast pace,” Gupta said in a statment.
As of the fourth-quarter 2022, Google ranks third in global cloud market share for cloud infrastructure services with 11 percent, trailing Microsoft at 23 percent and Amazon Web Services at 33 percent, according to data from Synergy Research Group. However, in terms of quarterly cloud revenue growth, Google Cloud is growing cloud sales at a higher rate than both AWS and Microsoft.
CloudWerx’s ‘Fearless Female Funding’ Round
Founded in 2020, CloudWerx is a cloud consulting startup that already has achieved Google Cloud Premier Partner status, while also recently earning Google’s Infrastructure Services Specialization.
In late 2022, Reed was able to raise an undisclosed amount during a Series A funding round from private investors.
“We had a round of funding that I called my ‘fearless female funding’ round. I did a lightning round that was under four weeks and then a bunch of people shared it. The next thing we knew, we had a round of almost entirely female financiers, which is pretty cool,” Reed said.
With the new funding, CloudWerx was able to hire top-notch talent like Microsoft’s Gupta as well as adding people to its engineering team and sales force.
“We see account management, sales prowess and the operations that we provide as incredibly important, but I consider that table stakes as a partner. We absolutely need to do that. At the same time, we will not allow our technology or engineering resources to be undercut. So that was where we heavily invested in bringing on full-time folks,” said Reed.
“So now we have people all over the country that are specifically located in geographies where there are Google offices so they can more intentionally partner with the Google team and Google reps,” she said.
CloudWerx also used some of the funding to help build a new Looker dashboard as well as another undisclosed product that the company plans to launch on the Google Cloud Marketplace in the new future.
“It’s about better understanding how can we provide the most value to customers using Google Cloud, and our customers that should be using Google Cloud today,” Reed said.