Lewis & Clark portfolio company grows fast

Tom Hillman

​Less than a year after receiving a sizeable investment from St. Louis-based venture capital firm Lewis & Clark Ventures, Blue Medora, a Detroit startup that develops enterprise cloud software, is set to grow fast as it deals with some of tech’s biggest companies.

Blue Medora raised $8.6 million from investors led by Lewis & Clark in October 2016. 

Today, according to Crain’s Detroit, Blue Medora has nearly $10 million in revenue with plans on doubling that figure this year.

Blue Medora’s software allows a single view of applications, databases and infrastructure to quickly resolve IT issues, increase uptime and optimize performance for business applications. The technology is used by companies such as IBM, Oracle and VMware.

The company has grown its product business by more than 240 percent and increased its customer base by 200 percent over the last year.

“Our growth is fueled by enterprises shifting their IT budgets to the cloud and demanding simpler, more comprehensive solutions to unite infrastructure, application and database monitoring,” Nathan Owen, CEO at Blue Medora, recently said in a statement. “Our customers are using IT analytics to increase application uptime and decrease engineering and time to market. We look forward to continuing this momentum in 2017 with some exciting new additions the pipeline.”

Other investors in the company include VMware, eLab Ventures, Start Garden and Grand Angels.

Lewis & Clark Ventures was founded by Tom Hillman in January 2015, shortly after he sold his stake in Answers Corp. for an undisclosed amount. Answers was acquired by Apax Partners in a deal worth $900 million.

Brian Hopcraft, another former Answers executive, is Lewis & Clark’s managing director. Hopcraft sits on Blue Medora’s board of directors.
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Brian Feldt covers technology, venture capital, startups, real estate and sports business.