As one of the co-founders of AvePoint, I can recall several distinct turning points across our 19-year history.
I remember sitting in a 2003 TechEd conference session held by Microsoft. They had just unveiled SharePoint 2003 (aka Version 2.0) for the first time and were receiving—let’s call it passionate—feedback from partners about the lack of a migration path. I stood up in that presentation, waved my hand and said, “We can do it, we can migrate you.”
That ended up being a turning point that took DocAve from an entrepreneurial venture of two coders in a public library in Somerset, New Jersey, to the rocket ship that would drive our company up the ranks of the Deloitte Fast 500 and Inc 5000 fastest growing private company lists.
I also remember sitting in our senior leadership meeting in 2013 facing some difficult choices following our decision to invest heavily in our SaaS platform. The cloud was still new and we were finding out the hard way that digital transformation is not just putting your products in the cloud, but committing the entire organization and business model to that transformation.
As a result of these turning points, it wasn’t just AvePoint that benefited, but our customers and partners as well.
Today, more than 21,000 customers worldwide and 16,000 large enterprises across all seven continents trust AvePoint software and services for their Microsoft Cloud data management, protection, and migration needs. And, by moving ahead of the market, our customers could turn their modern workplaces and information management into competitive advantages.
Today is another turning point for AvePoint. We announced this morning that the company has raised approximately $200 million in commitments from new minority equity investors to fuel our global growth and expansion.
The full release can be read here.
Why You Should Care
If you’re a current customer, this investment will allow us to continue our mission to provide you with more product updates in shorter release cycles (along with our popular Insider Release program). We’re also expanding our customer success team globally to better help you achieve your goals.
If you’re a partner or managed service provider (MSP), AvePoint plans to use its latest round of funding to accelerate its growth and investment into its channel offerings that provide managed service providers with the tools to better migrate, manage, and protect the Office 365 environments of their small and medium business clients.
AvePoint aims to add more than 40,000 customers through the channel in the next two years. To do this, we will also be investing in everything that supports our partner’s success from software to support and beyond. Learn more about partnering with AvePoint here, and learn more about our channel offerings here.
If you are in this space and helping your organization through its digital transformation, this investment will help us produce more educational and thought leadership content from events to eBooks and webinars.
Final Thoughts
This journey I have been on with AvePoint has been incredibly rewarding. I know I can speak for my fellow co-founder and co-CEO Kai when I say that our enthusiasm for this important work hasn’t waned in the slightest and our vision for what AvePoint can be has only grown.
The AvePoint logo symbolizes a rising sun just above a mountain, but also a person with a bowing head. It reflects our attitude—dream big and strive to make a difference, but always with humility.
In that spirit, I’d like to thank everyone who has helped build AvePoint to what it has become today—all of our past/present employees, investors, customers, and partners—as well as what it will be tomorrow.
As a parting thought, I’d like to encourage everyone to find your Ikigai or “reason for being.” It’s important to find purpose in your work and latch onto something that gets you out of bed in the morning! Enabling collaboration and bringing people together for good is what drives me–what drives you?
