Skytap raises $45M Series E led by Goldman Sachs to move legacy apps to the cloud
Tom Krazit / GeekWire :
Context & Ripple Effects
Skytap's $45M Series E is a scale-up of a bet it made years ago: the company had already raised $35M in 2014 for its cloud-based development-and-testing service, and this round doubles down on the harder enterprise problem — relocating legacy applications rather than building new ones. It lands three weeks after Azuqua's $10.8M Series B, part of a same-summer cluster of Seattle-area cloud tooling raises.
The more telling detail is the check writer. Goldman Sachs leading this round prefigures the bank's later pattern of anchoring growth rounds across the enterprise cloud stack — from SingleStore's $116M Series F extension to Spectro Cloud's $75M Series C — making it a recurring financier of the tools enterprises use to leave their own data centers.
First-order effects
- Skytap gets an extended runway and a marquee balance sheet behind its legacy-app migration business, while Goldman Sachs takes a direct equity position in enterprise cloud tooling rather than just advising on it.
- Enterprises still running legacy workloads gain a better-capitalized vendor whose sales capacity now matches the multi-year timelines those migrations actually take.
Second-order effects
- Competing development-and-testing clouds must match Skytap's funding depth or differentiate on price, since the round removes the 'will they be around' objection from enterprise procurement.
- Adjacent IT-management players feel the pull toward consolidation — the same corridor where Apptio acquired VMware spinoff Digital Fuel for $42.5M months later — as buyers prefer fewer, broader platforms over point tools.
Third-order effects
- If Goldman's cadence holds through SingleStore and Spectro Cloud, Wall Street growth capital becomes structural infrastructure for the cloud-migration toolchain itself, with banks shaping which vendors survive the enterprise transition.
- Legacy-application migration shifts from a services business sold by consultancies to a product category funded at venture scale, changing who captures the economics of moving old software to the cloud.
The trend: Growth-stage capital from major financial institutions is increasingly underwriting the enterprise cloud-migration stack, turning legacy-app modernization into a funded product category rather than a consulting engagement.