Cloud startups continue to draw big investments from the venture capital community. Last week, Lucid Software Inc. added its name to the list by raising $36 million in funding from Spectrum Equity for its two managed design services.

The first is called LucidChart and aims to ease the creation of wireframes for large digital projects like corporate sites, while the other is a more specialized tool known as LucidPress that is geared towards publishers. It can be used to design most of everything from brochures and email newsletters to entire online magazines. The two services support the work of more than eight million professionals in 175 countries, a user base that the Spectrum Equity’s investment will help expand even further. Lucid also plans to spend some of the funds on developing advanced features for its burgeoning enterprise clientele.

The startup announced the funding against the backdrop of fellow software-as-a-service provider Applause Inc. securing $35 million in a funding round of its own. The capital will be used to drive the adoption of its managed application testing platform, which provides access to a more than 250,000 quality assurance experts around the world. When a developer has a new software project in need of assessment, they can use the service’s web-based interfaces to specify exactly where the application should be tested, on what devices and under what network conditions.

Applause claims that its approach can help organizations dramatically speed up their release cycles, a goal Microsoft Corp. is pursuing as well with its Azure Service Fabric. The offering provides a ready-made environment for deploying Dockerized applications that doesn’t require developers to worry about the scaffolding supporting their code. Last week, Redmond moved to expand the platform’s appeal by announcing support for Linux, the most popular operating system in the container ecosystem. And it also announced plans to open-source several of Azure Service Fabric’s core components later this year.

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