Cloudforce, a Maryland-based AI infrastructure company, has secured $10 million in Series A funding led by Owl Ventures, with strategic participation from M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. The investment strengthens Cloudforce’s partnership with Microsoft, giving the company access to enterprise sales channels and product teams while supporting the growth of its flagship platform, nebulaONE.
Expanding Global Adoption
The nebulaONE platform now supports over three million users across 90 institutions worldwide, including the University of Oxford, UCLA, University of Maryland, and London Business School. Demand continues to rise, with new deployments occurring weekly. Built on Microsoft Azure, the platform enables institutions to run multiple AI models—such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta—within private cloud environments, ensuring data security and compliance.
Serving Regulated Industries
Cloudforce targets sectors where data control and regulatory compliance are critical. The platform addresses challenges such as data sovereignty, privacy regulations (FERPA, HIPAA, GDPR), and cost management. After achieving HIPAA certification, Cloudforce has already onboarded healthcare customers and plans to expand further into public sector applications. Its services-led approach, combining platform deployment with consulting and on-site engineering support, helped the company achieve 100% subscriber retention in 2025.
Investor and Expert Support
Investors praise Cloudforce’s approach to infrastructure. “Cloudforce has cracked the code on scaling AI infrastructure in a way that satisfies the rigorous security demands of top-tier universities while delivering a user experience that students and faculty love,” said Lyman Missimer, Owl Ventures. Michael Stewart of M12 added, “nebulaONE transforms powerful AI models into secure, compliant, and deployable business assets for the public sector.” Alwyn Collinson, Head of the AI Competency Centre at Oxford, emphasized its practical value: “At Oxford, we see AI not as a tool of the future but as a capability that needs to be deployed responsibly in the present.”
Cloudforce plans to use the funding to accelerate international expansion, hire new talent, and launch sector-specific AI agents for education and healthcare workflows. Founder and CEO Husein Sharaf highlighted the mission: “We are building the infrastructure that will power the next decade of discovery, and at a cost no other platform can offer.”