Founded in 2012 in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Qbox delivers enterprise search and analytics as a service by hosting and managing clusters of the popular open-source NoSQL database, Elasticsearch. Through Qbox’s services, companies can eliminate the need for developers to install, maintain, patch, monitor, and scale their search infrastructure.
Qbox came to Lighter Capital earlier this year for a RevenueLoan because they wanted to open a San Francisco office and purchase their infrastructure at scale. With a $120K cash infusion, they were able to open an office on Market St. in the same building as Twitter, and buy Amazon Web Services (AWS) computing hours in bulk at lower prices.
Since the funding four months ago, their revenue has doubled, and their gross margin has greatly increased.
“We’re excited about the investment from Lighter Capital,” says Qbox CEO Mark Brandon. “Being headquartered in Arkansas, the access to capital is limited. Compared to other equity options, Lighter Capital’s process was easy and I was able to focus on my business and deploy the capital right away. Putting financing to work helped us scale quickly and really freed up our on-going cash-flow.”
Qbox was the winner of the Global Accelerator Network program, the Ark Challenge, which attracted initial investments and helped them land recognized brands as customers. Their impressive roster of clients includes CBRE, Nordstrom Trunk Club, 99 Designs, Doordash, Dubsmash, and many others.
“Mark is a technical founder who has very deep and sophisticated knowledge in the cloud hosting space,” says Lighter Capital Chief Investment Officer Molly Otter. “We see a huge benefit in the solution Qbox is offering. Developers no longer spend hours installing, configuring, networking, securing, and monitoring Elasticsearch clusters, and can focus instead on their main task, which is development.”