Aussie brothers raise $9m for training startup A Cloud Guru after less than two years

A cloud computing training start-up founded by brothers Ryan and Sam Kroonenburg in late 2015 from their bedrooms in London and Melbourne has raised almost $9 million from a US venture capital firm as it looks to expand the range of its business.

A Cloud Guru has raised the funding round from Boston-based fund Elephant Venture Capital, after it trained more than 250,000 students in 160 countries online in how to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) in less than two years.

It intends to use the money to expand its content offering to encompass all major cloud vendors, including Microsoft's Azure, Google and Salesforce.

The company has built a large following for its courses on social networking site LinkedIn, with Ryan Kroonenburg, who teaches some of the courses, racking up the maximum 30,000 connections that the site allows.

Sam Kroonenburg said his brother had started to become a social media celebrity of sorts and had begun to be stopped in the street for selfies and autographs.

"I'm his brother, so I don't see it from the outside, but the love that people have for Ryan and his style of teaching blows my mind. When we go to events he's mobbed. People want to take selfies with him," Sam Kroonenburg told The Australian Financial Review. Read more

Yolanda Redrup - Australian Financial Review - 31 July 2017