Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enterprise collaboration and content management vendor HighQ has secured $50 million in a growth equity funding round.
The investment came from a joint round of investment from One Peak Partners, Morgan Stanley Merchant Banking and Goldman Sachs Private Capital.
Founded in London in 2001, HighQ employs nearly 200 people globally and has offices in the US, Europe, Australia and the UK. It develops cloud solutions to enable enterprises securely share information, capture data and optimize business processes.
In a statement Ajay Patel, CEO and co-founder of HighQ, said the investment comes at "a significant milestone in HighQ’s history and the beginning of an exciting new era for the company." The money will be used to expand HighQ’s traction in the legal space and enable its expansion into financial services.
Learning Opportunities
While HighQ’ s Collaborate platform provides comprehensive collaboration functionality, it is the secure file sharing capabilities that will probably be of most initial interest among the legal firms and banks.
Just last week, Bluecoat’s Shadow Data Report highlighted the problem of shadow IT in the enterprise. The report, covering the second half of 2015, analyzed nearly 63 million documents that customers of Elastica — part of Blue Coat Systems — are storing and sharing in collaboration and cloud file sharing services such as Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and Office 365. It found 26 percent of documents were at high risk of exposure and 23 percent were shared publicly.