Nivio Raises $21 Million in 'Magic' Cloud Desktop Funding

Desktop-as-a-service provider Nivio (the company spells its name with a lower-case “n,” for the record) has announced the close of a $21 million round of funding that will support the company’s stated mission “to bring the magic back to computing.”

The round of funding was led by India-based Videocon and Kansas City-based AEC Partners, and will go into expanding Nivio’s Palo Alto office while also enabling cloud platform rollout in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

“We are extremely happy to bring two new passionate investors into our team. We’re also very proud that nivio has successfully delivered 7x returns to some of our angels in this round. The support we’ve received from our angels over the last seven years has been unparalleled and without their support we would not have gotten this far,” Nivio founder and chief wizard (really?) Sachin Dev Duggal said in the press release.

What’s especially interesting is that Nivio hasn’t even debuted its Apple iOS, Google Android, Windows or Apple Mac clients yet (general availability is slated for later in February). Those will arrive alongside the Ubiquity client, which Nivio boasts will deliver an entire Microsoft Windows desktop, complete with Microsoft Office, over any HTML5 browser. Nivio also promises an app store will enable users to rent programs for their virtual desktops, and cloud storage keeps files in sync anywhere.

Right now, Nivio is in a closed beta, but interested folks can apply for preview entry. Long term, it seems as though Nivio is especially excited about its untethered desktop model coming to the education market. It’s early days still, but I would be shocked if Nivio didn’t get into the cloud service provider channel ASAP after actually launching under general availability.

In the meanwhile, stay tuned to TalkinCloud for updates on the fast-growing, increasingly well-funded virtual desktop market.