Tehama, an Ottawa-based startup that provides a cloud-based software solution for remote teams, has raised a $14 million CAD ($10 million USD) Series A in its first external fundraise.
“Our vision is to build the world’s leading platform for the exchange of work over the Internet.”
– Paul Vallée
The Series A was led by OMERS Ventures, which recently closed its $750 million USD fund. Tehama’s round also saw participation from BDC Capital’s Industrial, Clean, and Energy Technology (ICE) venture fund. Tehama will use the funds to invest in its product, accelerate its roadmap, and respond to new opportunities brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the increased need for remote working solutions.
“We believe the future of work is virtual, and our vision is to build the world’s leading platform for the exchange of work over the Internet,” Paul Vallée, CEO and founder of Tehama, told BetaKit. “While no-one can possibly celebrate the COVID-19 pandemic and the related health and economic crisis, we are nevertheless delighted at the silver lining that progress towards that vision has been permanently accelerated.”
Tehama’s platform offers teams secure virtual offices, rooms, and desktops, and allows team members to access company data and enterprise applications. The startup said before the COVID-19 pandemic, there was already a transition to remote working taking place, but the current environment has resulted in a higher demand for work-from-home solutions.
“We have received amazing feedback to reprioritize and accelerate our roadmap,” Vallée told BetaKit. “We are dying to build those game-changers and this money will be put to good use.”
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Tehama was developed at Pythian, a global IT services company founded by Vallée in the 1990s that developed tools that provided IT services to global clients with strict security and compliance requirements.
Vallée soon discovered that there was a greater need to expand and take the Tehama product to market. The product was launched to the public in September 2018, spun out from Pythian a year later, and now reports that 150 enterprises use the platform.
“We couldn’t have predicted that it would be so dramatically put to the test by a global pandemic-driven work-from-home mandate, but seeing how the team has stepped up over these past few weeks has only strengthened our conviction in both the product and the team behind it,” said Shawn Chance, venture partner at OMERS Ventures.
“It’s clear that 2020 is a year for the history books and we only get to play our cards once,” Vallée said. “Playing them right means accelerating our efforts at taking this offering to market, establishing a channel strategy, increasing sales efforts globally, [and] marketing efforts.”
Image source Tehama via Facebook.