An update on Workspot: Funding, growth, and their ‘cloud desktop fabric,’ aimed at the enterprise

In late September, Workspot announced a $19 million series D round of funding, as well as 318% growth for their cloud products over the last year.

It’s been a while since we checked in with Workspot. The last time we talked, VP of marketing Brad Peterson told us about their pricing model, which includes bundled compute capacity. And before that, Gabe took a deep look at their DaaS platform when it launched.

This time around, I caught up with Amitabh Sinha, Workspot CEO and co-founder, and indeed, there were big updates to go over.

Workspot still isn’t sharing any overall customer or revenue numbers, so we’ll have to go on that 318% growth figure. They’re at about 90 employees, and their total funding is now at $55.8 million.

Their primary plans for the funds are to grow sales and marketing, but they also plan to onboard more channel partners, especially in specific verticals like 3-D graphics.

From a strategy perspective, the biggest change is that Workspot is going after enterprise-size and Fortune 500 customers now. Back in 2016, when Workspot DaaS 2.0 came out, they told Gabe that their ideal customer was in the 500 to 5,000 user range.

What’s changed? Amitabh said a lot of their product investment is going into making Workspot work across global deployments, with a good SLA. They call this their “cloud desktop fabric,” and the goal is to make everything seamless. Today, customers might have desktops in five or 10 regions, but the idea is that someday they might have desktops in dozens or even a hundred regions. Workspot works in any Azure region, and it’s still just a single management console to deploy, monitor, and manage everything. Amitabh wants all the regions to basically be something that customers don’t have to worry about.

With enterprise customers, Workspot’s go to market is still as a turnkey offering. According to Amitabh, they typically get brought in for net-new use cases, which include what are now becoming common DaaS uses, like setting up offshore developers with powerful workstations, or 3-D graphics collaboration. (They also like to highlight Dudek, a customer that uses them to process data collected by drones.) Then later on, after the first couple of use cases have been implemented, customers will look at replacing their existing traditional VDI and desktop virtualization deployments.

Workspot’s deal size is increasing, and the funding press release noted a net revenue retention of 171%.

Of course, as an Azure-focused provider, thanks to Windows Virtual Desktop, they’ll be offering Windows 7 extended support and Windows 10 multi-session. (Remember, there are a couple of different ways to use WVD, and Workspot is in the camp that cares about the licensing entitlements rather than the WVD brokering capabilities.)

It really has been gratifying to see the rise of so many different cloud desktop options like Workspot and others. We’ll keep watch how this space evolves, but it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come since Brian and Gabe wrote their book about DaaS back in 2014.