Great Hill Partners Announces $17 Million Investment in MSP Reliam

A Los Angeles-based managed services provider (MSP) that specializes in public cloud, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), this week secured a $17 million investment from Boston private equity firm Great Hill Partners.

Reliam LLC also has a commitment from the investor for an additional $75 million, aimed at funding acquisitions and organic growth.

Announcement of the capital outlay came during this week’s AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, and also included the naming of Simon Anderson as the MSP’s new chief executive officer.

“Reliam’s expert managed services are the perfect fit for enterprises and mid-sized companies seeking to confidently migrate applications to the cloud – and have them capably managed once there,” Christopher Gaffney, managing partner at Great Hill Partners, said in a statement. “We are excited that Simon Anderson is joining the company as CEO to lead Reliam in supporting customers who want to take full advantage of the flexibility, cost effectiveness, and scalability offered by public clouds like AWS.”

The 16-year-old MSP specializes in consulting and management of public cloud architecture, implementations and migrations.

Great Hill Partners’ maintains a fund with $5 billion in commitments and has a portfolio with multiple interests in the MSP space, including Evolve IP.

Under the deal, Gaffney and Great Hill colleague Drew Loucks will join the board of directors at Reliam.

“I’ve carefully built Reliam to be a platform for growth over the last few years, and it is truly gratifying to secure Great Hill Partners’ expertise and investment,” Nate Johnson, founder and president of Reliam, said in a statement. “With this funding, we can build out even more capabilities for cloud managed services to support the explosive adoption of public cloud for all sorts of applications – including serverless computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence and IoT architectures.”

New CEO Anderson, who had been an “entrepreneur in residence” with Great Hill Partners, said it was exciting that his collaboration with the private equity firm had “come to fruition.”

“Under founder Nate Johnson, Reliam has created a world-class managed services offering and a loyal (and rapidly growing) customer base,” he said in a statement. 

“Reliam is poised to play a meaningful role in the next phase of cloud adoption with expanded investment in software tools, solutions architects, cloud engineers, and the AWS partner ecosystem,” Anderson added. “I look forward to my new position at Reliam.”

Send tips and news to [email protected].