Huddle snags $51 million to keep its enterprise collaboration service in the game

Collaboration service Huddle tripled sales to enterprise customers in the first three quarters of this year. Today, it is capping off the year by tucking $51 million in investment funding into its cloud-based service.

The company provides the ability for governments and large companies to store, share, access, sync, and work on files with others inside or outside a firewall.

The new funds, which bring the total raised by the company to $86 million, will be used to increase the product team for continued platform development.

“In September, we announced [our] secure publishing and analytics platform, which will be available in early 2015,” CEO and cofounder Alastair Mitchell told VentureBeat via email.

He added that key areas for development include “mobile collaboration, with our Android apps being overhauled,” improvement to customers’ business transactions, and new collaborative features.

With new contenders for collaboration and cloud storage emerging, Huddle needs to keep innovating. Mitchell pointed to Microsoft SharePoint as its key competitor, noting that it is primarily an on-premise tool, “content within SharePoint is difficult to access remotely and the platform lacks basic mobile support.” He said that Huddle can work alongside the venerable Microsoft offering — when it doesn’t replace it.

In addition to the boost in its enterprise sales compared to last year, the company has planted a big footprint in several governments. This includes NASA, 80 percent of the UK central government, and the government of Greenland.

This Series D round was led by Zouk Capital, with participation from Hermes GPE Environmental Innovation Fund and from all the existing investors, including Matrix Partners, Jafco Ventures, DAG Ventures, and Eden Ventures.