DigitalOcean to Buy Pakistan’s Cloudways for $350 Million

Photo Credit: Cloudways

Cloud giant DigitalOcean has entered into an agreement to acquire Pakistan's Cloudways, a leading managed cloud hosting and software as a service (SaaS) provider for SMBs, for $350 million.

The acquisition will simplify workflows for small to medium-sized businesses looking for simpler ways to build and scale their digital businesses.

Cloudways provides simple onboarding and day-to-day management that is purpose-built for specific SMBs looking to outsource their on-ramp to the Internet, helping them eliminate the complexities of cloud infrastructure. So that they can spend more time running and scaling their business.

The acquisition of Cloudways expands DigitalOcean's serviceable market within global SMBs and adds options for digital agencies, e-commerce sites, bloggers, freelance developers and builders hosted on WordPress, PHP and Magento. WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) and, according to W3Techs, it powers 43 percent of all websites on the Internet.

Enterprises and SMBs choose Cloudways to improve the efficiency, value, support, reliability and flexibility of their infrastructure and application management. As a result, they can save time and money while growing their business. Cloudways provides a differentiated offering with an open and flexible platform, incredible price-to-performance ratio and superior customer experience.

DigitalOcean and Cloudways have been close partners since 2014 – Cloudways currently relies on DigitalOcean infrastructure to power nearly 50% of its customers. Cloudways serves an international and growing customer base with an industry-leading NPS score of 71. Together, DigitalOcean and Cloudways will serve more than 124,000 customers who pay more than $50 a month, representing approximately 84% of the pro forma company's total revenue.

"SMBs represent more than 50% of global gross domestic product (GDP) and spend $70 billion on cloud infrastructure today. With this acquisition, we're making it easier to start, build and scale businesses on DigitalOcean. are," said Yancey Spruill, CEO of DigitalOcean.

"Cloudways and DigitalOcean share values ​​around simplicity, community, openness and support that are key features of how we differentiate in the marketplace. Together we can better serve SMBs with a simple , will focus on providing a simple, intuitive and trusted platform for them to build their businesses and pursue their dreams of entrepreneurship," Spruill added.

Cloudways has built a rapidly growing business with impressive customer metrics that generate free cash flow. Sproul continued, “Importantly, we are excited to add Cloudways to the DigitalOcean family because they not only share our vision for the SMB market opportunity, but also a principle of 50 businesses. which shares our commitment to deliver strong returns for our investors."

"We have worked closely with the DigitalOcean team since 2014 and are incredibly excited to now officially become part of the company," said Aqib Gadit, Co-Founder and CEO of Cloudways.

"SMBs love simplicity, efficiency, predictability, affordability, and great collaboration. Together with DigitalOcean, we can turbocharge our mission to help SMBs grow through our cloud offerings."

The transaction is expected to close in September and DigitalOcean forecasts a contribution of between $13 and $15 million to Cloudways in fiscal 2022.