Electric, which gives companies remote IT support and infrastructure visibility, raises $20M

Electric, a company that serves businesses with real-time IT support and data on their IT infrastructure, has raised $20 million in a series D-1 round of funding, which follows on from a previous $90 million series D round back in October.

Founded in 2016, Electric integrates into Slack and Microsoft Teams to give employees access to chat-based technical support, powered by Electric’s own in-house team of more than 100 technicians.

The IT crowd

These technicians, which promise to respond within 10 minutes of most requests, can help with anything from hardware configurations or network troubleshooting, to password resets and more.

At a time when millions of people across the world have had to adapt to remote working, Electric is well-positioned to capitalize.

“Even our smallest customers are realizing the benefit of hiring the best talent no matter where they’re located, and realizing that their local teams can be productive and happier with more flexibility,” Electric CEO and founder Ryan Denehy told VentureBeat. “This is great, but it also requires that your core business utilities like IT need to evolve along with that, and enable that flexibility rather than stand in the way. Legacy solutions can’t do that very effectively.”

The cost aspect is particularly important here, with Electric targeting smaller companies looking for an alternative to a costly in-house centralized IT team

“It generally doesn’t make financial or logistical sense to hire dedicated IT staff until you’re around 100 FTEs (number of employees), but the vast majority of SMBs aren’t — and will never be — 100-plus FTEs,” Denehy continued. “That’s where we come in.”

The average company these days has dozens or even hundreds of SaaS [software-as-a-service] applications, which introduces logistical headaches in terms of managing permissions, security, and onboarding (or offboarding) new users. That is why on top of general IT support, Electric provides support around security, device and inventory management, application and cloud management, and more.

“Prior to Electric, nothing existed other than local consultants — many of whom don’t know much about SaaS software, and are ineffective in remote or hybrid environments,” Denehy explained. “We built our solution to solve all this.”

And underpinning all of this is data — Electric gives companies visibility into their IT infrastructure, including insights into support request volume by type, response time, and more.

Show me the money

Prior to now, Electric had raised around $180 million, and with its latest $20 million extension, the company is doubling down on its plans to serve its customers with “data-driven business insights and self service tools.”

More specifically, this will include strategic acquisitions, and follows a duo of acquisitions over the past 18 months which has seen Electric take two IT service providers under its wing — Sinu and Techvera. The money will also be used to expand into “new markets and verticals,” and roll out a new marketplace for SaaS apps that will make “Electric and IT that much easier to buy and use.”

It is worth noting, however, that Electric is already fairly cash-heavy — Denehy said that it still has most of the money that it raised from its initial series D round sitting in the bank. So, why raise more now?

“I’m sure most companies say this, but we didn’t need the money — however, our roadmap is extremely ambitious,” Denehy said. “We’re thinking a lot more about our SaaS marketplace, a lot more about a self-sign-up product, being more aggressive with M&A. Those things all have a very real cost.”

Electric’s D-1 funding round was led by Harmonic Growth Partners, and brings the New York-based company’s valuation to $1 billion.