ControlUp has made a name for itself in DEX but now has much broader ambitions, reports James Goulding
In March, digital employee experience (DEX) company ControlUp joined an exclusive group of software companies by reaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), driven by the successful expansion of its product offering and the launch of its ControlUp One enterprise subscription.
CEO Jed Ayres is now aiming to grow ARR to $200m within three years, compared to the 11 years it took the company to reach $100m.
Propelling this growth will be ControlUp’s move from a focus on VDI and DEX to autonomous endpoint management (AEM) powered by AI.
Ayres expects 2026 to be a pivotal year for the company as it introduces more AI into its platform and more customers use automated actions to remediate problems. ControlUp currently runs 50 million automated actions every week – a 319% increase since the beginning of the year – and Ayres is confident this will rise to 100 million in the next 12 months.
This would be a step change for ControlUp which started out in 2014 with the release of a software download giving real-time monitoring and visibility of VDI estates and over the next decade grew into a company with about $60 million ARR derived almost entirely from that one SKU.
In 2020, ControlUp extended its monitoring to physical endpoints, followed, in 2025, by user monitoring for SaaS and web applications, giving IT teams the information needed to optimise the Digital Employee Experience (DEX). In 2024, it introduced a cybersecurity and compliance solution, ControlUp for Compliance (originally called Secure DX), for detecting and remediating endpoint vulnerabilities and weak security configurations.
“When I got here two and a half years ago, 85% of our revenue was paid to one product. It’s now down to 65% for VDI. The desktop business is 29% and growing in high double-digits. Our security offering, also from a dead start about a year and a half ago, is also growing in triple digits,” explains Ayres.
Another big development over the last two years has been the company’s evolution into an enterprise platform with the launch in January 2025 of ControlUp One giving enterprise customers access to ControlUp’s diversified portfolio through a unified platform and single subscription.
Designed for organisations with at least 5,000 seats, these $250,000 to $300,000 contracts now make up around 21% of ControlUp’s business. Almost all of the 100-plus ControlUp One contracts sold to date have a technical resource manager attached who can help customers take full advantage of the platform including its developing agentic AI capabilities. This has allowed ControlUp to build a $3 million services business that is growing at 100% year-on-year.
“The platform has been a unique path to success for us. I would say it’s been critical in these large enterprises that we just take that whole set of IP and make it really easy to consume on a three-year single SKU model that’s very aggressively priced. And they’re choosing that to cover their whole estate,” says Ayres.
AI acquisition
In January, ControlUp took a big step forward in its AEM strategy with the acquisition of Unipath, an AI-powered security automation and SOAR platform, with the intention of using its agentic AI framework for end user compute.
The addition of Unipath moves ControlUp beyond rules-based and script-based automation, which is how it has enabled support teams to remediate issues and vulnerabilities in the past, to a self-learning remediation model that has the potential to autonomously diagnose and remediate issues without IT teams having to design, script or maintain automation workflows.
At ControlUp’s EMEA Beyond Experience channel partner conference at Wembley Stadium earlier this year Ayres described this capability as ‘foundational to where we’re taking the business’.
“In the traditional IT model, you have an endpoint that emits a signal, you have a dashboard, and you have humans involved from thereon in. They investigate, they decide what to do, they remediate, and the end user has to confirm that it’s working. This is the way we’ve been doing it for the last 40 years, creating a lock-in between more tools, more tickets, more troubleshooting. Where we’re going is an opportunity to break the chains of this model entirely with one that is able to observe, to act autonomously, to verify and to learn and build on itself,” he said.
“I think every manual fix today is going to be something that we can automate out. This is going to free up IT from doing the same repetitive fixes over and over again. In three years, I would suggest, doing it the way we’re doing it today will be a wayto lose your job. The goal is not better troubleshooting, it’s no troubleshooting.”
In this respect, AEM turbocharges the benefits that ControlUp already offers through what it calls ‘the three Cs’: Collect – gathering data every three seconds on up to 10,000 metrics; Connect – joining the dots by bringing that data together in dashboards and integrating it into other systems; and Correct – remediating issues and vulnerabilities.
Collectively, these deliver real-time visibility into VDI, SaaS applications and desktop environments and the automatic remediation of problems, resulting in reduced downtime, fewer tools, fewer agents, fewer support desk tickets and less escalation, all of which carry a cost, while also enabling more informed decisions relating to software asset management, software reclamation and device life cycle management.
“We have a lot of data. We have 10,000 metrics that we’re collecting every three seconds, and in many cases, we’re holding that data set for a whole year. Where we’re seeing most value is when we intersect that data with new AI models that enable us to see patterns that cause anomalies and trouble tickets and productivity loss for the end user and IT teams. Using these models, one, to identify the pattern and the anomaly and, two, to identify very quickly how to automate that so that when it does appear it’s eradicated using a known script or automation is where we’re spending all of our energy right now,” explains Ayres.
Disrupting endpoint management
He adds that this capability and the launch of new features like live remote management, which enables someone on a support desk to log on to a device in real time to remediate and resolve issues, will pit ControlUp against established endpoint management companies.
“People may not be cognizant of how disruptive this could be to some of the legacy endpoint management tools and techniques. In the next 12 to 24 months, this is going to take on a life of its own as people see those durable, repeatable use cases and actually start to recognise the ROI. It’s going to be profound.”
Existing endpoint management leaders will also be enhancing automation with agentic AI, but in Ayres’ opinion Controlup has the edge thanks to its speed advantage and comprehensive data set.
“You see legacy endpoint management tools quickly trying to add AI, but they don’t have as rich a data set as we do. Because of VDI being so wobbly, we set up this three-second clock speed, making us 20 times faster than other VDI players. Our stack of data goes quite a bit higher, wider and faster than others.”
Those others include a wide spectrum of companies, from vibe-coded start- ups to billion-dollar legacy endpoint management companies. ControlUp is positioned between the two and hoping in exactly six months. That’s going to be more common. We should be at 90% of our code being written by AI by the end of the year.” He adds that half of ControlUp’s 400 employees are inside the company’s product development group and that that engine is ‘running really hot’. “We’re building smaller teams that are activating much faster, and we have to bring the best of both to the table thanks to its sizeable base of enterprise customers that generate a lot of data for its AI model to work with and to its increasingly agile development culture.
“The question for the large legacy endpoint management companies that have way more customers than we do is can they pivot quickly enough to this new era? I’ll put my money on ControlUp right now. The speed at which we’re responding to requests from customers, the speed at which we’re innovating is unlike any company I’ve ever sat in. About 70% of our code today is being written by AI. We just brought a product to market called DaaS IQ that will compete against Hydra and Nerdio in the AVD optimisation space, and we did that with a very small team in exactly six months. That’s going to be more common. We should be at 90% of our code being written by AI by the end of the year.”
He adds that half of ControlUp’s 400 employees are inside the company’s product development group and that that engine is ‘running really hot’.
“We’re building smaller teams that are activating much faster, and we have customers that ask for something on a Friday and by Monday it’s in the product. That’s the type of innovation speed that you can expect to see from us going forward.”
AI use cases
The challenge and priority for ControlUp now is to generate durable AI use cases that show how customers can speed up remediation and save money by reducing the number of tools used, the number of trouble tickets and the number of people employed in support.
“That’s our focus right now, to walk into every organisation with these agents laid down collecting data and showing a path to fewer tools, fewer tickets, fewer humans doing the mundane work. Even today, if you reverse engineer thousands of trouble tickets, you see that for these guys it’s Groundhog Day; they solve the same problems over and over and over again. Over the last 30 or 40 years, the cost and complexity of managing Windows endpoints specifically hasn’t got that much better. We have more tools that are collecting more data, creating more noise – not always signals – and the ratios of people that are managing these end points really hasn’t improved that much.
This is the quandary for many of these enormous endpoint management companies and this is why we’re staking our claim that DEX is the keyhole into autonomous endpoint management. That is the category we want to lead. The addressable market is enormous.”
In the meantime, ControlUp is helping users be more efficient with the launch of ControlUp AI Assistant, the first feature powered by its Pulse AI agentic intelligence layer. An LLM chatbot for the data inside ControlUp that can also connect to AI MCP services and interrogate other systems, AI Assistant allows users to ask AI, in plain English, for information and assistance.
M&A strategy
In support of its evolution, ControlUp will continue to make acquisitions. And not just for IP. For the first time, it will also be looking to gain customers with ARR attached to them.
“One of the things I will say about the M&A strategy we’re building is that we know who our constituent is and who our buyer is. It’s really this end user compute IT guy who wants fewer tools, less troubleshooting, less trouble 28 tickets. That’s core to how we think about acquisitions too. I love it when I see two or three tools being consolidated. We’re trying to find things that fit that narrative so that eventually a ControlUp One platform win will see five or six tools taken out.”
A stronger channel
Another part of Ayres’ plans for building a company with exceptional AI-driven innovation and a high growth rate and profitability is to build a stronger channel and a bigger ecosystem.
“One thing that came out of Beyond Experience that really excites me is a re-energised channel. Almost every metric we have for measuring the activity of our channel, like deal registrations, is up triple digits this year. From a channel perspective, we’re just getting a lot of momentum.
“The other thing that’s happening is we’re really starting to make progress with the global system integrators, which, going back to that origin story of being product-led, is an area we never made a big investment in until recently. We have people on the ground in India now. We’re building our channel competency with TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), HCL Tech and Tech Mahindra. They are all set up to transact with us. It’s a little bit of a virtuous circle, because as we’ve been winning more and more of these large enterprise customers, they immediately turn around and do RFPs and expect the large system integrator houses to be able to utilise ControlUp as a foundational tool. This has created a virtuous circle, where we have them coming to our doorstep and we’re going to their door. When you look at the largest players in DEX, half of their revenues are coming from these large system integrators. It’s a huge lever for us. We have 11 RFPs right now, where the GSIs are leading with ControlUp for a DEX opportunity. That just speaks to the opportunity that we’ve been missing.”
As well as developing relationships with GSIs, ControlUp has launched a new multi‑tenant platform and partner programme specifically for MSPs, ControlUp for MSPs, as Ayres advances his mission to boost sales through the channel.
“When I started, we were at 50% through the channel. In the last two and a half years, we’ve got to 72%. When I was at IGEL (Ayres’ previous employer), we were 100% channel and that’s where I’d like ControlUp to get to.”
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