• Marks a significant milestone in the company’s ambitions to move large enterprises off mainframes and onto the cloud as part of their digital transformation initiatives
• Funding will scale research capabilities and the global marketing program
• Team of industry heavyweights led by Pivotal Labs founder Rob Mee 

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Wednesday 7 February, San Francisco, CA - Mechanical Orchard, the technology business transitioning global 2000 companies away from mainframe-based IT systems to cloud-based applications, today announces it has raised $24 million in a Series A funding round, led by Emergence Capital. 

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Mechanical Orchard uses pioneering iterative, AI-enhanced, and reverse engineering approaches to safely and effectively move large enterprises off legacy systems and onto the cloud. The approach significantly reduces risk due to the enhanced visibility and control CIOs and CTOs have over the process, while ensuring critical systems stay online. This leads to radically improved commercial capabilities; including faster speed to market, enhanced research and development capabilities, and eased integration of new revenue models. 

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Led by Emergence Capital, with further investment from Industry Ventures, Spider Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Cendana Capital, and Webb Investment Network, the funding will support continued investment in platform research and development and a comprehensive global sales and marketing program. Further hires are expected across the business in the next 12 months. 

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Founded in 2022, and headquartered in San Francisco, CA, the Company boasts an impressive team of technology industry heavyweights. Founder and CEO, Rob Mee, founded agile software development consulting firm, Pivotal Labs; Co-Founder and COO, Matthew Work, has held many leadership titles in global technology companies including Cognizant and Amazon.com. The broader leadership team comprises world-class engineering capabilities, including Chief Scientist, Kent Beck, creator of Extreme Programming. The team now totals 50+ with an international presence in the UK, Ireland, Italy, and Germany. 

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Demand for the service continues to grow and enterprise customers include global logistics giant Omni Logistics. 

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The issue of mainframe reliance remains one of the critical unsolved IT challenges in the world today: $13 trillion of the US economy and at least 71% of the Fortune 500 still rely on mainframe systems. The total global addressable market currently stands at $66 billion. 

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Commenting on the announcement, Mee said, “When it comes to moving off mainframes, CIOs and CTOs at many of the world’s largest organizations simply don’t want to entertain the idea of a failed transition on their watch. Our mission is to help them with a safe, efficient, and reliable way forward, which will radically transform their business for good. I am immensely proud of our solution, which is the culmination of a lot of hard work and ingenuity from some very smart minds, and this funding is a big step closer to achieving our ambition.”

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James Ryan, VP of Software Engineering at Omni Logistics, added, “As a person responsible for managing our digital transformation across the globe, the prospect of modernizing our IT infrastructure often kept me up at night. Mechanical Orchard’s team made quick work of dissecting our legacy systems, core business processes, and charted a course for our future technology. Their disciplined approach to solving ‘the hard problems’ in software engineering is unparalleled in the industry, and delivered results from Day One.”

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Jake Saper, General Partner, Emergence Capital said, “Emergence was founded 20 years ago to invest in tech spearheading transition from on-prem servers to the cloud — think Salesforce. AI has unlocked an entirely new chapter in this story, and Mechanical Orchard is now the company at the forefront. It’s applying AI meaningfully to solve what was considered an impossible challenge, it’s serving a truly massive market, and there’s never been a better team-market fit — Rob Mee is the perfect person to lead this charge.”