EF5 Alum CloudNC Raises £9M Series A
We’re delighted to announce that Entrepreneur First Alum CloudNC has raised a £9 million Series A to continue their mission to transform the manufacturing industry. We were joined in the round by lead investor Atomico and our friends at Episode 1 and Backed.
CloudNC’s mission is to make the CNC milling machines used to manufacture everything form turbine blades to iPhone parts into one click devices that can produce any part easily and efficiently, effectively halving their cost.
“Interacting with factories will become smooth and frictionless, just like using Amazon.” CloudNC CEO Theo Saville told us in our interview with him for the EF Podcast Scaling Ambition.
One of the best things about what we do at EF is that we have the privilege of getting know some of the world’s most exciting founders before they start their companies — and the same is true of CloudNC Founders Theo Saville and Chris Emery.
As it happened, Theo and Chris met six months before they both joined the program, after being connected up by EF Co-Founder Alice Bentinck. Chris was doing EF4 while Theo was interviewing for EF5 and at the time both of them were working on 3D printing ideas, which made the connection a natural one.
“I think we still have some of the Facebook messages where I pitch him” Theo says, remembering their initial conversations. “We both thought this problem was going to be much easier than it ultimately has been, but when the day came to start EF, the process of finding a co-founder took all of 15 seconds. And we’ve been working together ever since.”
While we were excited about the team at the time, it’s been remarkable to watch them grow as they’ve navigated the challenges of building a phenomenally complex piece of technology.
Fortunately, Theo and Chris seem as well prepared as any team for the climb ahead. As Theo told us himself, the split between the two is fairly natural. As CEO, Theo brings industry knowledge and business acumen to the table, while CTO Chris can draw on his technical background and skillset to drive forward the development of their technology.
At the same time, both have developed a good knowledge of the market they’re trying to serve in the middle, which provides the crucial piece of overlap we see in all great founding teams.
“If you have that [business acumen, technical skills and market knowledge]” Theo says, “you’re constantly looking in all directions at all times and it’s very hard to be taken by surprise by some huge technical risk or some huge business challenge.”
EF is all about finding the world’s most ambitious individuals and helping them to create deeply technical companies that solve globally important problems.
And while CloudNC is still at the start of its journey, we’re looking forward to seeing the impact of Chris and Theo’s ambition on the manufacturing industry in the years to come.
