OpsCompass closes early stage round

OpsCompass announced this week its receipt of $1.5 million in an early stage equity deal. Dundee Venture Capital, M25, Invest Nebraska, Nelnet, and the Nebraska Angels participated in the round. OpsCompass is a subscription service business that helps enterprises migrate workload to the public cloud. Specifically, the company has compliance, governance, operations, and cost features…


OpsCompass announced this week its receipt of $1.5 million in an early stage equity deal.

Dundee Venture Capital, M25, Invest Nebraska, Nelnet, and the Nebraska Angels participated in the round. OpsCompass is a subscription service business that helps enterprises migrate workload to the public cloud.

Specifically, the company has compliance, governance, operations, and cost features that help enterprises use the flexible development resources of Azure or AWS while still maintaining strong policy, security, and governance control.

This “high fidelity” view of an organization’s status and position in the public cloud helps ensure that large companies stay within company protocols and compliance standards for their industry. The first clients for the firm include global leaders in finance and healthcare where compliance and security standards are required at extremely high levels.

OpsCompass is the creation of a team that includes President – Manny Quevedo, and the founding technologist – John Grange. This duo has worked on multiple data center related products in the past. The two recognized that as the cloud has evolved, there has been a massive shift to public cloud services. In fact, research firm Gartner projected in August 2018 that annual cloud services revenue would grow from a 2017 number of $145 billion to more than $278 billion.

This massive shift encouraged Quevedo and Grange to found OpsCompass. What the two recognized from different angles was that enterprises were struggling to realize the full benefits of the public cloud. Quevedo came at the problem from a market perspective – as prior to the founding, he was the head of Global Business Development for NTT Solutionary (a large Japanese conglomerate security company). During his time at CoSentry (a data center company he co-founded) and NTT Solutionary, Quevedo recognized that the market was shifting but that many large enterprises were struggling with just how to shift their loads.

Companies like Microsoft and AWS were attractive, but the actual path and services to move were slow to coming to the Midwest. Quevedo recognized the market opportunity.

“The speed at which the market was expanding was amazing. And no one was paying attention to the Midwest. We have been able to provide key services for large enterprises throughout the region – because many firms simply did not see the acute need in the middle part of the country – home to hundreds of very large enterprises,” said Quevedo.

Grange was simply frustrated. As a keen technologist, Grange was called regularly by clients regarding a desire to shift – but literally an inability to configure Azure and AWS to move the significant enterprise loads. He was providing hours of consulting to his non-clients simply to get them positioned for other work that he planned with them. Grange’s desire to build OpsCompass was first for himself and his clients who needed something simple and flexible that could manage development operations and security in the cloud – but that was also easy for them to relate to.

“So many of my clients wanted to feel the scuzzy cables in their hands and simply did not like the feeling of lack of control over the physical system. I think that we have built something that lets them feel as if they could walk outside their office and pull a cable – but that is 100% cloud based, software,” said Grange. “The clients sought a tool that would allow them to look at their configuration and status as though it was in a physical data center, but with the function, price, and flexibility of the public cloud.”

Together the team built out an initial version. This initial product – called Helm – was strongly aided by the State of Nebraska’s prototype and research and development programs.

“Nebraska is a state that values entrepreneurship and innovation,” said Department of Economic Development Director Dave Rippe. “Investing in businesses is one of the best ways to grow our state. The Business Innovation Act gives us a set of tools — in this case, the prototyping program and the Academic R&D Grant Program — to turn those values into action. Our congratulations to OpsCompass, and their research partner, NARI, on this latest success.”

With the aid of those programs, the company was able to defer fund-raising until late 2018 and 2019. This meant the company secured significant revenue and a number of name brand clients – including ConAgra, Tyson, and Securities America. This also meant that the company was able to preserve equity and ensure that when it raised money it had a clear pathway to advancing the firm’s client base.

As reported by Silicon Prairie News, OpsCompass acquired an Omaha based development consultancy, Agape Red in Fall 2018 to bolster its development staff and provide on-boarding and consulting for their clients. This freed up Grange and new Chief Technology Officer, Dave Kerber, to dig into building strong applications for compliance and governance. This module rolled out in late fall 2018, and the company continues to grow its customer base throughout the Midwest.

Kerber told SPN at the time, “I could not be more excited about the trajectory of OpsCompass. My team and I are extremely excited to work on a product with such growth potential as this one. And it hits our strength as both a development shop and one that provides consulting services to ensure that the clients can efficiently get to a software as a service world – not just linger in a long-term transition from hell.”

This growth has been particularly strong in Minneapolis because the firm opened a Minneapolis office and hired one of Microsoft’s key regional sales leaders, Scott Griffith.

“As a former Microsoft exec, I can tell you how badly clients need help with the transition. We almost never hear ‘no’ when we talk about our efforts. Instead, we get a lot of questions about how we do it. One of the best parts of our product is that it puts the current people into a position to succeed in the cloud – not just provide future promises of efficiency or savings. We have tools that demonstrate instant savings and clear understanding of how to best utilize resources,” said Griffith.

It is not surprising that numerous funders became interested in the company as their growth exploded. Specifically, an initial conversation with Invest Nebraska turned into connections with multiple funders. Moreover, Ben Williamson of Invest Nebraska was instrumental in bringing the Nebraska Angels, Nelnet, and M25 to the table. His role shepherding the deal was critical to its speed and efficiency – allowing the company to focus on continuing its sales growth.

When reached for comment, Williamson said, “It is really rare that we see the growth potential of a company, like OpsCompass, in the Midwest. The shear size of the market and their market traction were both surprising and extremely exciting from an investment perspective. This is a great deal for Invest Nebraska.”

According to Pitchbook, this is Dundee Venture Capital’s first Nebraska investment in over two years. John Jenkins, Partner at Dundee Venture Capital stated: “This one checked all of our boxes. Great team. Market traction. Fast growth. Significant revenue. Good price.” Dundee Venture Capital is the largest active venture fund in the State of Nebraska, but it has seen significant opportunities around the entire region, particularly Chicago.

In conversations with John Jenkins and other partners, OpsCompass saw this as a huge positive. The founders were delighted to find a well-connected partner (in Chicago, a hotbed of Azure users) but with such strong Nebraska and Omaha roots. With all the excitement, OpsCompass is trying to focus on the little things – including getting new modules produced and continuing its strong sales growth.

For more information, check out the website at www.opscompass.com.

[From the Editor: Look later in the week for another article by Silicon Prairie News on this funding – using this as a template for Nebraska prototype and research and development programs. These programs are models for other states and are working extremely well. It is for this reason that the Nebraska Legislature is currently debating the merits of expanding the Prototyping program.]

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

Get the latest news and events from Nebraska’s entrepreneurship and innovation community delivered straight to your inbox every Wednesday.