YellowDog Extends Funding and Adds Former IBM and Microsoft Executive to the Board

YellowDog appoints Reid Downey as a non-Executive Director and completes £2.5m funding round

YellowDog, which provides high-performance cloud compute orchestration technology to some of the world’s most successful Media & Entertainment studios and financial services firms, announced last week that it had appointed Reid Downey to its Board of Directors. In addition, YellowDog has secured £2.5m additional funding led by Bloc Ventures, an investment company founded by industry veterans from ARM Holdings and Vodafone.

Reid Downey is an experienced senior executive in the international enterprise software sales market, including a decade at Microsoft leading software and cloud enterprise sales of Microsoft Azure and Office365 to Fortune 500 companies. His experience will add additional depth and insights to YellowDog’s board as the company accelerates its global sales expansion with existing and new customers, particularly in the US.

The additional funding will be used to increase the scale of YellowDog’s current rendering business and to further extend its presence in the financial services markets, building on its successful expansion into this market in 2018.

Gareth Williams, CEO of YellowDog said “We are excited to welcome Reid to the Board and to secure this further funding given our tremendous year of growth ahead. With our recent wins in the financial services market and more in the pipeline for this year, we are only at the tip of the iceberg in this market. The funding will enable us to support our global customer base and extend our technology into new markets such as aerospace.”

Reid Downey said “I am pleased to join YellowDog in this exciting phase of its growth. In my time at Microsoft, we saw and helped enable the exponential expansion of compute resource across the globe. I have been impressed by the team and see strong potential for the YellowDog platform across enterprises in many verticals. I look forward to working with the team at YellowDog to execute this expansion.”

Bruce Beckloff, CEO of Bloc Ventures, said “Bloc has worked closely with Gareth and the team since our initial investment at the end of 2017. We have been impressed by YellowDog’s progress in developing and deploying their technology into new vertical markets, most notably financial services. YellowDog is on track to become an enterprise software provider of global scale and we are pleased to support the company to achieve their goals.”