Cutover raises $17 million for cloud workplace orchestration tools

Cutover, a U.K.-based company developing cloud-hosted workplace orchestration software, today announced that it has raised $17 million in a series A round led by Index Ventures, with participation from Sussex Place Ventures, Contour Ventures, Partnership Fund for New York, and Outrun Ventures. The influx of capital comes after a $2.5 million seed round in June 2016 and brings the four-year-old company’s total raised to around $20 million, which CEO Ky Nichol says will bolster client engagement and product development.

“This new category of work orchestration and observability helps turn complex sets of human and machine activities into well-orchestrated, repeatable flows of activity, enabling teams to go faster while causing [fewer] customer-facing incidents,” said Nichol. “It’s hard to see what’s going on across these sets of work because they’re in the dark matter of the enterprise. Cutover fills the important gap of enabling organizations to manage these dynamic flows of work and to get structured, informative data to enable optimization.”

Cutover’s Amazon Web Services-hosted suite, which Nichol claims is actively used by 14 global financial services companies — including Barclays, Barclaycard, Schroders, Cardano, Tesco Bank, and Nationwide — packs tools that enable teams to  rehearse events and receive communications via text, email, Slack, and Skype when those events go live. Portals and logs let executives and managers visualize real-time data as it comes in and conduct analyses that lay the groundwork for future improvement.

A central dashboard dubbed the Node Map displays all tasks in a division or organization, with a view that lets team members visualize and edit the construction of plans as they’re started and completed. Clicking on individual task nodes surfaces key information, such as the critical path to the selected task or the status of dependent tasks. And integrations with software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms like Slack, Twilio, Jenkins, Mattermost, Servicenow, and Ansible enable users to kick off actions within third-party tools and funnel notifications through company-preferred channels.

Nichol says Cutover’s solutions have been used for cloud migration, incident recovery, system validation, and market readiness activities like foreign exchange pretrade checks and start-of-day checks, as well as “some of the biggest IPOs in 2019.” Furthermore, he asserts that they increase change capacity — an organization’s total workload for running current operations and conducting change — by 20% on average while reducing the number of live operations incidents by 20% and critical event implementation costs by 50%.

It’s this effectiveness and success that could give Cutover a leg up on competition like Capacity, Happeo, and Nexthink in the nearly $82 billion workplace orchestration market.

“Cutover sits at the heart of the most important enterprise IT trends today,” said Index Ventures’ Ari Helgason, who plans to join the company’s board of directors. “Orchestration between different teams and technologies is the key to the successful execution of large projects. Cutover’s platform solves a key pain point that is at the top of most CIOs’ agendas.”

Barclays group CTO and chief innovation officer John Stecher said: “Cutover is a graduate of our accelerator program and from that has become adopted across the bank. Cutover helps us to go faster on change and safeguard customer-facing operations in a range of use cases, from supporting our cloud migration to enabling an effective service recovery capability.”