CloudOn raises $16M in Series B funding to move beyond ‘Office for tablets’

CloudOn, the tablet app for creating, editing and managing Microsoft Office and Adobe documents in the cloud, has announced $16m in Series B funding as it looks to continue its mission to transform the mobile productivity space.

Just to recap, CloudOn delivers full Microsoft Office capabilities with Dropbox integration, transforming tablets into mobile workspaces capable of accessing your Office documents on the go. The technology taps the power of the cloud to connect to Microsoft Office software on CloudOn’s servers, so in effect your device is essentially used as a screen.

The suite also provides Adobe Reader to view PDFs – everything from simple forms to complex 3D documents – and a universal viewer for any file, ranging from raw Photoshop images to everyday image files, including PNG, JPEG and GIF.

The story so far

CloudOn initially raised $1.8m in equity and debt funding whilst it was known as AppToU, and then went on to raise a further $7.7m last September under its new moniker.

CloudOn launched initially in the US back in January, bringing Microsoft Office functionality direct to the iPad. It swiftly found its way to pole position in Apple’s free app category, and in response to “enormous demand”, it finally hit Apple’s UK App Store in February.

In April we reported that CloudOn was nearing 1 million downloads, just as it launched v2.0 with Box.com support & email sharing. And the big news last month was that it was extending beyond the iPad and onto Android tablets (Ice Cream Sandwich and Honeycomb tablets, 3.1 or higher), complete with Google Drive integration.

Now, in the wake of its expansion into 16 more countries earlier this month, CloudOn’s mammoth $16m funding round, led by The Social+Capital Partnership (Social+Capital) with participation from Translink Capital and existing investors Foundation Capital and Rembrandt Venture Partners, the startup is looking to take its productivity suite beyond its headline selling point, ‘Office for tablets’.

Mamoon Hamid, General Partner at Social+Capital, has also joined CloudOn’s Board of Directors, and he says that moving forward, the company plans to continue to grow its user base “aggressively” internationally, and expand its offering, partnerships, and platforms.

“We’ve been following CloudOn since their launch and are excited to see their success in the market,” says  Hamid. “They are addressing a growing problem in the enterprise as employees are looking to be more productive across their PC, tablets and smartphones while they are on the go. I’ve invested in and work closely with two disruptive companies, Box and Yammer, and see similar potential with CloudOn to bring easy to adopt and easy to use productivity software into the enterprise.”

The company will use the funding to scale operations and develop a productivity workspace available on any mobile device – so tablets were the launchpad, but smartphones is where the company’s now looking, with PCs on its radar too.

The broader vision is to make it easy and intuitive to create, review, edit, share, track and annotate information while on the go. CloudOn also plans to expand its workspace to allow for improved group productivity, giving teams the ability to not only create content but also bring greater context to their workflow.

The Silicon Valley-based startup has already partnered with Microsoft, Adobe, Dropbox, Box and Google, and we’ll no doubt see a slew of similar partnerships emerge in the coming months. Indeed, I hate to make predictions as they often come back to bite you in the butt, but I’d say CloudOn is a company ripe for acquisition at some point in the foreseeable future.

➤ CloudOn: iPad | Andriod Tablets