Application governance provider AvePoint Inc. has raised $200 million in funding from a group of investors headlined by TPG Sixth Street Partners and Goldman Sachs.

The round, announced this morning, marks the company’s third infusion of outside capital to date. AvePoint has raised a total of $294 million so far.

AvePoint makes tools for managing deployments of Microsoft Corp.’s Office 365 suite and SharePoint collaboration platform. Its flagship product is a solution called Cloud Governance that enables administrators to regulate how workers use Office 365 applications. A firm’s information technology department can, for instance, require that workers request approval before creating a new chat room in the Microsoft Teams communications service.

AvePoint’s product portfolio covers a range of related use cases as well. Its tools allow companies to back up Office 365 and SharePoint files, migrate records from other services and restrict employee access to sensitive data such as financial information, to name a few key features.

The focus on making governance tools exclusively for Microsoft products limits AvePoint’s addressable market in a certain respect. However, the sheer size of the Microsoft customer ecosystem means there’s no shortage of growth opportunities. AvePoint’s software is currently used by 16,000 organizations with more than 7 million individual users and the company today set a goal of adding 40,000 more customers within two years.

The software maker hopes to reach that ambitious target by establishing relationships with more resale partners. Additionally, AvePoint General Counsel Brian Brown hinted today that the leadership team will invest a part of the $200 million funding round into acquisitions. Asked about AvePoint’s deal-making plans by Virginia-based outlet RichmondBizSense, Brown said, “You’re going to see that in 2020 we’ll be a pretty active company.”

There are multiple potential avenues for expansion available to AvePoint. The company could expand its focus to additional Microsoft services such as Azure, say by making its features for regulating user access to sensitive records available on the cloud platform. In the long term, AvePoint might look even further afield and add support for Office 365 competitors such as Google LLC’s G Suite.

Photo: Avepoint