Jon Morehouse launched PowerTools in 2019 to help companies ship static sites and serverless apps to their cloud accounts on providers like AWS and Azure. When a customer asked him if they could use PowerTools to deploy their software into one of their customer’s cloud accounts, Morehouse was skeptical.
Morehouse told TechCrunch that after that question, he started talking to other SaaS founders about the concept of deploying their applications into customers’ clouds. He discovered that this was something founders were being asked frequently from their customers. So he decided to pivot.
In 2021, Morehouse launched Nuon, which is building a “bring your own cloud” (BYOC) platform. Nuon’s tools are meant to help SaaS companies deploy their applications and software to their customers’ cloud accounts easily while still offering the same benefits a customer gets by using a vendor-hosted software like turning on servers or running updates on the product.
“It’s like a hybrid of SaaS and self-hosted,” Morehouse, now CEO, said. “It’s deployed in the customer’s account, so it’s isolated, it’s deeply integrated, their data stays with them, but it has that SaaS experience, and it’s managed by the vendors.”
Morehouse added that while some SaaS companies answer this ask from their customers by manually deploying their software into a company’s cloud each time, that’s expensive, time-consuming, and hard to scale. He added that some companies, like larger enterprises, essentially require their software to be in their cloud. This means that companies that don’t have the resources to offer this service just miss out on potential customers.
“This is kind of the elephant in the room that I think a lot of founders stay up at night about,” he said. “This is the thing that could kill their company, because if they can’t figure out how to power their most sensitive — and their biggest — users, then it’s game over.”
Nuon looks to fill that void with its BYOC infrastructure platform. The product was launched in November 2023 and has been operating in stealth since. Now its emerging from stealth and announcing that it raised $16.5 million in funding. Uncork Capital, M12 (Microsoft’s venture capital fund), Mantis VC, and Redpoint Ventures invested, among others. Morehouse said that he initially set out last summer to raise a pretty small seed round, but he decided to raise more after strong positive feedback from James Wu, a partner at M12.
“The reason that we were able to go out, and decided to raise more than we had set out to, is because, when I talked to James [Wu], it was clear that he saw this [BYOC] movement as big as SOC 2 and as big as the movement of cloud,” Morehouse said.
Uncork Capital managing partner Andy McLoughlin told TechCrunch he was introduced to Nuon’s seed deal through an Uncork founder. When McLoughlin responded that he didn’t have time to look at the deal, the founder told him he’d be an idiot if he didn’t.
McLoughlin said he’s glad he looked because he had seen this need from both his own past startup experience and from the enterprise companies he’s worked with. While he was doing due diligence, he pinged Quinn Slack, the co-founder and CEO of Sourcegraph asking if he could do a vibe check with Morehouse. Slack was initially skeptical of Nuon’s idea but after meeting, Slack cut a check himself. M12 joining the round didn’t hurt, either.
“Microsoft, they get to see everything,” McLoughlin said. “They have surveyed the market. A handful of players are doing something similar, and they believe Nuon was the right solution and the right team and the right timing.”
Nuon doesn’t have a ton of competition right now, and Morehouse said that the majority of companies don’t have the resources to build each integration from scratch. This explains why a lot of Nuon’s customers are early-stage AI startups that are looking to use Nuon’s BYOC services as a way to stand out from their competitors and gain a market edge.
The company hopes to exit beta by the end of the first quarter and is ramping up hiring. Morehouse said the company is also working on new products like Nuon Action, which would allow companies to deploy their own code in a customer’s cloud to help with debugging and management.
“If you think about the last 17 years of software, everything has been built for SaaS,” Morehouse said. “We believe the next 17 years of software is going to be built for bring-your-own cloud. It’s going to be AI first. It’s going to be designed to run in the customer’s cloud first.”