Riding a wave of momentum started by a global pandemic, Denver-based cloud services company Pax8 announced Wednesday it raised $96 million in equity capital and began its global expansion by acquiring a United Kingdom company.

“The capital market is still looking for good deals,” said co-founder and CEO John Street. “The stronger deals are really getting looked at, and we were certainly one of the strongest growth companies through the pandemic.”

Pax8, founded in 2012 and with its headquarters in the Denver Tech Center, experienced phenomenal sales growth in 2020, attributed largely to the fact the pandemic forced companies’ workers to leave the office and work remotely.

That accelerated the need for cloud access, which many companies have been putting off, Street said.

“The pandemic literally accelerated cloud adoption by three years by our estimate,” Street said. “It created a real tipping point in cloud adoption.”

The company also acquired Wirehive, a U.K.-based cloud hosting and consultancy company.

That company has about 50 employees, growing Pax8 to more than 550 worldwide — the majority of whom are based in metro Denver. It also has offices in Colorado Springs and San Antonio.

The “cloud” refers to the ability to store and retrieve computer data remotely, which previously had been stored on physical servers or computers at a company’s physical office.

Pax8 works with managed service providers (MSP), providing them cloud services and other tech products to offer companies they service.

MSPs basically take the place of a company’s IT department, providing storage, backup and security.

Pax8 also has an impressive list of vendors, including giants such as Microsoft, RingCentral, Zoom and Symantec.

Pax8 allows the MSP to provide all those vendor services, like Office 365 or security or video conferencing capabilities, to a company in a streamlined way and with one simplified invoice.

“It’s a more responsive and transformative way to use technology, rather than on premises at a physical location,” said Ryan Walsh, chief product officer and channel chief.

“Instead, the infrastructure is in the cloud. … The products are delivered quickly and automatically, and the MSP can bill seamlessly. Before, that small business would have to go to 12 different portals to buy something or figure out what they owed.”

The $96 million capital infusion came from investors lCatalyst Investors, Sageview Capital, Blue Cloud Ventures and Liberty Global Ventures.

Street said it puts Pax8 in a position, for the first time since its founding, to be profitable.

“The challenge was this was very expensive to get off the ground,” Street said. “You have to understand that we went through some very tough years.

“It was a lot like the chicken and the egg. We’d try to sign on vendors, and they’d ask ‘Who are your partners?’ We’d reply, ‘Well none but we’re getting some.’

“Then they’d ask about products and say, ‘Come back when you get more.’ We had three to four years where just the cost of acquiring a customer was extremely expensive. But they almost all said we had a great idea, so that kept us going. We saw the massive market opportunity.”

By 2018, the company was ready to pounce.

“We finally had critical mass, there really was no upside cap as to where we could take it,” Street said.

Then the pandemic hit in 2020, and Pax8 officials feared that if just 20% of the businesses they served went under, they would be in dire straits.

Instead, demand boomed for cloud services as most everyone worked remotely.

“With that capital infusion, we can finally do everything we envisioned we could do,” Street said. “This will move us to profitability in a great way.”

As far as the company’s DTC headquarters, it’s been vacant since March. At 350 employees capacity, it wouldn’t even be big enough to house all its Denver employees.

“We were negotiating for 50,000 more square feet when the pandemic hit,” Street said. “Now we need to re-imagine how we’re going to use that facility.”

The company hired 191 people in 2020 and promoted 230 more.

As far as the future, Street said it wants to bring jobs to smaller communities in Colorado such as Grand Junction, Fremont County and Durango.

“We’re planning to grow faster this year than we did in 2020, especially with this new venture in the U.K,” he said.