Mechanical Orchard – a company helping businesses transition away from mainframe-based IT systems to cloud-based applications – announced it has raised $24 million in a Series A funding round, led by Emergence Capital. There was also further investment from Industry Ventures, Spider Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Cendana Capital, and Webb Investment Network. And the funding will support continued investment in platform research and development and a comprehensive global sales and marketing program. Further hires are expected across the business in the next year.
Mechanical Orchard utilizes pioneering iterative, AI-enhanced, and reverse engineering approaches to safely and effectively move large enterprises off legacy systems and onto the cloud. And this approach significantly reduces risk due to the enhanced visibility and control CIOs and CTOs have over the process, while ensuring critical systems stay online. This leads to radically improved commercial capabilities; including faster speed to market, enhanced research and development capabilities, and eased integration of new revenue models.
Launched in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, CA, the company boasts an impressive team of technology industry heavyweights. Founder and CEO Rob Mee founded agile software development consulting firm Pivotal Labs; Co-Founder and COO, Matthew Work, has held many leadership titles in global technology companies including Cognizant and Amazon.com. The broader leadership team comprises world-class engineering capabilities, including Chief Scientist, Kent Beck, creator of Extreme Programming. The team now totals 50+ with an international presence in the UK, Ireland, Italy, and Germany.
KEY QUOTES:
“When it comes to moving off mainframes, CIOs and CTOs at many of the world’s largest organizations simply don’t want to entertain the idea of a failed transition on their watch. Our mission is to help them with a safe, efficient, and reliable way forward, which will radically transform their business for good. I am immensely proud of our solution, which is the culmination of a lot of hard work and ingenuity from some very smart minds, and this funding is a big step closer to achieving our ambition.”
– Founder and CEO Rob Mee
“As a person responsible for managing our digital transformation across the globe, the prospect of modernizing our IT infrastructure often kept me up at night. Mechanical Orchard’s team made quick work of dissecting our legacy systems, core business processes, and charted a course for our future technology. Their disciplined approach to solving ‘the hard problems’ in software engineering is unparalleled in the industry, and delivered results from Day One.”
– James Ryan, VP of Software Engineering at Omni Logistics
“Emergence was founded 20 years ago to invest in tech spearheading transition from on-prem servers to the cloud — think Salesforce. AI has unlocked an entirely new chapter in this story, and Mechanical Orchard is now the company at the forefront. It’s applying AI meaningfully to solve what was considered an impossible challenge, it’s serving a truly massive market, and there’s never been a better team-market fit — Rob Mee is the perfect person to lead this charge.”
– Jake Saper, General Partner, Emergence Capital
