Cloudability lands $1.1M venture round
December 22, 2011
Cloudability, a Portland startup providing software to help manage cloud computing spending, on Thursday announced a $1.1 million investment round.
Though the seed round was led by a pair of Bay Area venture capital firms — Trinity Ventures of Palo Alto, Calif., and Walden Venture Capital of San Francisco — around half of the funds came from a collection of angels, including $255,000 from Portland investors.
“What we had heard over and over is you can’t raise a lot of money in Portland and have to go out of town for it,” said J.R. Storment, one of the company’s founders. “It’s been a really cool experience to get deeper into the community and have some of these people just go out for us.”…
Cloudability’s software helps companies avoid what Storment called “cloud sprawl.”
With cloud computing — the use of web-based subscription software services — becoming more prevalent, companies run the risk of overspending on services.
“The problem we’re tackling is one of people moving their business en mass into the cloud — whether it be a few services here or there or more — and a whole new set of problems with the potential for big overages,” he said. “You literally have dozens of people in an organization signing up for these services with their own cards and expensing them.“
Storment told the story of a San Francisco-based company that hosts Web-based slideshows.
One Thursday afternoon, Slideshare turned on 50 extra cloud-based servers to crunch data. An hour after doing so, a crisis arose that demanded the company’s attention, forcing staff to pull an all-nighter. They came back to work the following Monday to realize that they’d left the servers running, costing the company $5,000.
“It was something totally preventable if they’d gotten an e-mail telling them to turn (the servers) off,” Storment said.
Cloudability’s software pulls in a company’s cloud-based services into a single interface, helping to monitor the company’s cloud spending and suggest ways to make more efficient use of resources. It has partnerships with 80 cloud services providers including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Heroku allowing it to access cloud billing and usage data.
Cloudability now employs four, including its three co-founders.
The seed funding will be used to expand its engineering team, help accelerate development of the software and integrate more cloud service providers into its program.
“Cloud computing continues to see massive adoption as the trend democratizes IT across all verticals and market segments,” Karan Mehandru at Trinity Ventures said in a news release. “While cloud services are meant to make business operations easier, flexible and more affordable, they often end up doing just the opposite. Cloudability makes it possible for any company to run cloud services, and makes managing and monitoring those services easier than ever before.”