Cloudforce, a Maryland-based AI company focused on regulated industries, has closed a $10 million Series A funding round led by Owl Ventures, with strategic participation from M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. The company said the investment deepens its go-to-market alignment with Microsoft, including access to Microsoft’s enterprise sales organization and product teams, as Cloudforce expands deployment of its nebulaONE platform.
The financing follows what Cloudforce described as the rapid adoption of nebulaONE across higher education and research institutions. The company said the platform now supports more than 3 million users across 90 institutions globally, including the University of Oxford, UCLA, the University of Maryland, and London Business School, and is being rolled out to new organizations on a weekly basis.
Cloudforce positions nebulaONE as an enterprise-grade “private AI environment” built to help institutions adopt generative AI while maintaining security controls and regulatory compliance. Built exclusively on Microsoft Azure, the platform is designed to operate inside a customer’s private cloud tenant and supports a “bring-your-own-model” approach, allowing organizations to use models from providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta while keeping data governance and usage policies under institutional control.
The company said the architecture is intended to address barriers that have slowed AI rollout in regulated environments, citing data sovereignty, privacy compliance, and cost management. Cloudforce highlighted support for regulatory frameworks including FERPA, HIPAA, and GDPR, and said the platform’s design helps institutions deploy AI tools without sending sensitive data into unmanaged third-party environments.
Beyond education, Cloudforce said it is scaling its presence in healthcare following HIPAA certification earlier this year and has already secured its first set of healthcare customers. The company also plans to move further into public sector use cases, targeting organizations that require strict security and compliance controls.
Cloudforce said it will use the new capital to accelerate international expansion, ramp hiring in 2026, and introduce vertical-specific AI agents tailored to education and healthcare workflows. The company also emphasized its services-led deployment model, which pairs the platform with consulting, organizational change management, and forward-deployed engineering support. Cloudforce said this approach contributed to 100% subscriber retention in 2025.
Microsoft’s investment through M12 builds on an existing partnership. Cloudforce was named Microsoft’s 2025 Education Partner of the Year and 2024 Supplier of the Year, positioning the company as a key Azure ecosystem partner for institutional AI deployments.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’re interested in the way nebulaONE brings together accessibility, security, and flexibility for users… 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.”
Alwyn Collinson, Head of the AI Competency Centre, University of Oxford
“At Cloudforce, we believe the latest and most capable AI models shouldn’t be a luxury reserved for the few who can afford hundreds a month in subscriptions, or are otherwise willing to trade away their private data for access… We are building the infrastructure that will power the next decade of discovery, and at a cost no other platform can offer.”
Husein Sharaf, Founder & CEO, Cloudforce
“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… The numbers speak for themselves: over ninety institutions, double-digit quarterly revenue growth, and a sales velocity that’s accelerating—not slowing.”
Lyman Missimer, Investor, Owl Ventures
“Cloudforce has demonstrated an exceptional ability to leverage the Microsoft Azure ecosystem to solve last-mile delivery challenges for enterprise AI… Their nebulaONE platform transforms powerful raw models into secure, compliant, and deployable business assets for the public sector.”
Michael Stewart, Managing Partner, M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund)
