Manish Kedia, CEO and president of CloudMoyo (CloudMoyo photo)

In a computing landscape where the word “cloud” figures into most every conversation and company name, the name CloudMoyo stands out. “Moyo” is Swahili for “spirit,” the same root word as the English word “mojo,” explained Manish Kedia, CEO of Bellevue, Wash.-based startup CloudMoyo.

Never mind that about 175 of the company’s rough 200 employees are based in Pune, India, with about 15 in the Seattle area and 10 elsewhere in the U.S.

“One of our co-founders was traveling in South Africa and learned this word,” said Kedia. “We want to embody the spirit of the cloud, which we believe is not just about saving money but about analyzing data.”

CloudMoyo last year was spun out of Icertis, a Bellevue-based contract-management company that raised a seed round in 2012. Icertis has its roots in Microsoft technology and culture, having been founded by former Microsoft manager Samir Bodas, and logically, so does spin-off CloudMoyo. CloudMoyo has built its intelllectual property on top of the Azure cloud service, SQL Data Warehouse, AI services, the Cortana Intelligence Suite and the Power BI analytics product, Kedia said.

“We knew our company’s heritage was in the cloud, and my focus has always been data,” he said. “So we decided to work at the intersection of cloud and data. Our software-as-a-service focuses on routing, trip optimization, and analyzing documents and unstructured data for liability and risk. ”

Bodas is now chairman of CloudMoyo’s board.

CloudMoyo has helped a major American railroad that it won’t name manage its operations and crews. It used the analysis of large data sets to create a scheduling system that helped coordinate the railroad’s 800 crew members, who work on 1,044 locomotives and 13,000 freight cars over 6,600 route miles. It also created a train-scheduling system intended to minimize train delays, spoiled goods and wasted man-hours.

Microsoft is not only CloudMoyo’s cloud provider but also “our first and best” customer, Kedia said. CloudMoyo has helped Microsoft manage deals and do planning scenarios for its retail stores.

The company’s six customers also include Toyota. Competitors include Optym, an optimization and automation firm.

CloudMoyo took “a small amount” of seed and angel funding initially and has been cash-positive from the outset, Kedia said. “We are frugal. We make ends meet. All the profits we generate go back into the business.” Having the bulk of the engineering staff in India has helped hold down costs, he said.

The transportation analytics market is “several hundred million dollars right now,” he estimated, and the advanced-analytics market is worth more than $1 billion.

[Editor’s Note: Post updated to clarify reference to CloudMoyo’s railroad customer.]

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