Jon Morehouse launched PowerTools in 2019 to help businesses ship static sites and serverless apps to cloud accounts from providers like AWS and Azure. When a customer asked if PowerTools could be used to deploy software to their cloud accounts, Morehouse was skeptical.
Morehouse told TechCrunch that after that question, he started talking to other SaaS founders about the concept of deploying applications to customers' clouds. He realized that this is a question founders often get asked by customers. So he decided to change direction.
In 2021, Morehouse launched Nuon to build a “Bring Your Own Cloud” (BYOC) platform. Nuon's tools make it easy for SaaS companies to deploy their applications and software to their customers' cloud accounts, while also providing vendor-hosted tasks such as powering on servers and performing product updates. We aim to provide the same benefits that our customers receive by using our software.
“It's kind of a hybrid of SaaS and self-hosted,” said Morehouse, who is now CEO. “It’s deployed in the customer’s account, so it’s isolated and deeply integrated, and the data remains with the customer, but it has a SaaS experience and is managed by the vendor.”
Morehouse added that some SaaS companies respond to this demand from customers by manually deploying software to the corporate cloud each time, but that is expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. . He added that some companies, including large enterprises, essentially need to have their software in the cloud. This means that businesses that don't have the resources to provide this service will only lose out on potential customers.
“This is the kind of question that keeps a lot of founders up at night,” he says. “This could kill a company, because if you can't find a way to power your most sensitive and largest users, then it's game over.”
Nuon is trying to fill that void with its BYOC infrastructure platform. The product was launched in November 2023 and has been operating in stealth mode ever since. Now, it has come out of stealth and announced that it has raised $16.5 million in funding. Investors include Uncork Capital, M12 (Microsoft's venture capital fund), Mantis VC, and Redpoint Ventures. Morehouse initially intended to raise a much smaller seed round last summer, but after receiving strong positive feedback from M12 partner James Wu, he decided to raise a larger seed round. He said he decided to procure it.
“The reason we were able to participate and decided to raise more money than planned was when I spoke with James, [Wu]it was obvious that he saw this [BYOC] As big a movement as SOC 2 is, and as big a movement as the cloud movement is,” Morehouse said.
Andy McLoughlin, managing partner at Uncork Capital, told TechCrunch that he was introduced to Nuon's seed deal through Uncork's founders. When McLoughlin responded that he didn't have time to consider the deal, the founder told him, “You'd be an idiot if you didn't.”
McLoughlin said he recognized this need from both his past startup experience and the enterprise companies he had worked with, so he was glad he considered it. While he was doing his due diligence, he emailed Quinn Slack, co-founder and CEO of SourceGraph, and asked if he could do a vibe check with Morehouse. Slack was initially skeptical of Nuon's idea, but after they met, he cut him a check himself. It didn't hurt that the M12 made it to the round either.
“Microsoft, they're going to be able to see everything,” McLaughlin said. “They researched the market. There are a few players doing similar things, and we believe Nuon was the right solution, the right team, and the right time.”
Nuon doesn't have much competition right now, Morehouse said, and most companies don't have the resources to build each integration from scratch. This explains why many of Nuon's customers are early-stage AI startups looking to use Nuon's BYOC services as a way to stand out from their competitors and gain market advantage. .
The company hopes to be out of beta by the end of the first quarter and is ramping up hiring. Morehouse said the company is also working on new products like Nuon Action, which allows companies to deploy their own code to customers' clouds to help debug and manage it.
“If you think about software for the last 17 years, everything has been built for SaaS,” Morehouse says. “We believe that the next 17 years of software will be built for the bring-your-own cloud. First it will be AI. First it will be designed to run in the customer's cloud.”