Startup ControlUp Technologies Ltd., which helps enterprises manage and troubleshoot the virtual desktops used by their employees for work, today announced that it has closed a $100 million funding round co-led by K1 Investment Management and JVP.

ControlUp will use the capital to expand its 250-person workforce. The additional employees will help the San Jose, California-based startup advance its plans to strengthen its partner ecosystem and build new product features. The company has raised more than $140 million to date. 

ControlUp provides a cloud platform that helps enterprises find and troubleshoot technical issues in their virtual desktops. A virtual desktop is a work computer that an employee accesses remotely. The work computer and the applications running on it are managed by the company’s information technology team, which makes it possible to ensure that cybersecurity requirements are met.

Virtual desktops have become more popular with the shift to remote work because they make it easier to give employees access to a company’s internal business applications. When issuing physical work computers to staffers, companies have to make a large investment in hardware and then maintain the devices after they are deployed. A virtual desktop, in contrast, may be delivered over the network without the need for extra hardware, which makes IT operations simpler.

But though they’re easier to manage than their physical counterparts, virtual desktops can still encounter technical issues. ControlUp’s platform is aimed at easing troubleshooting tasks.

The platform includes algorithms that can detect common technical issues such as excessive virtual desktop load times and application login failures. ControlUp can also help IT teams troubleshoot issues that arise from problems with the physical device that an employee uses to access a virtual desktop. The platform collects diagnostics data about an employee device’s central processing unit, memory, storage and other components.

For managing virtual desktop environments, ControlUp provides several tools. The startup’s platform includes shortcuts, dubbed actions, that enable administrators to make a specific change to a system’s configuration quickly. When tackling complex malfunctions that require more than one action, administrators can use ControlUp to run troubleshooting scripts that carry out an entire sequence of tasks.

ControlUp automates some of the manual work involved in virtual desktop maintenance. Running troubleshooting scripts, for example, is sometimes time-consuming because it’s difficult to determine which of the numerous scripts used by an IT team is capable of resolving a given technical issue.

The platform provides a feature that finds the most suitable script automatically. The platform also lets administrators compare the configuration of a malfunctioning system with similar devices that aren’t malfunctioning to identify what specific setting causing the issue. 

“ControlUp gives IT teams a 360-degree view of their entire digital employee experience,” ControlUp co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Asaf Ganot wrote in a blog post today. “Taking less than 10 minutes to deploy, IT teams can get up and running fast, and can proactively monitor and improve the health of their systems, gain architectural-level insights, and ensure employees have the freedom and flexibility to work from anywhere.”

Fixing virtual desktop malfunctions faster has the potential to help organizations boost employee productivity. If a system that employees rely on to perform their day-to-day work experiences an outage, business operations can’t resume until the issue is resolved. As a result, the faster troubleshooting is carried out, the more effectively companies can reduce the business impact of outages.

ControlUp says that it has recorded a 50% increase in revenue over the last year amid growing demand from enterprises. The sales boost was partly the result of customers deploying more than 1 million new user seats, the startup says. ControlUp’s customers include, among other organizations, four of the top five health insurance providers in the U.S. and four of the world’s six leading telecommunications providers.

Photo: ControlUp