Alter Blog • July 27, 2021
Spectro Cloud’s recent Series A financing announcement heralds a bright new chapter in the development of this new high-growth innovator in Kubernetes (K8s) orchestration and we at Alter Venture Partners are excited to be part of the unfolding story. Even though containers themselves are not a new trend and K8s has been the undisputed choice for enterprise container management for some time now, Alter, as an early stage venture fund, believes that there are still big companies to be built in this product category. Alter is enthusiastic about our investment in Spectro Cloud for the following reasons:
Management: It is a cliché amongst venture capitalists to say that management is the first, second and third reason for investing in a start-up. Nonetheless, the Spectro Cloud team has strong subject matter expertise and a proven track record through their notable success at CliQr, a story with which Alter is very familiar. CliQr was a pioneer in software application management solutions for hybrid cloud environments well prior to K8s being widely adopted. The three co-founders of Spectro Cloud, Tenry Fu (CEO), Gautam Joshi (VP Engineering) and Saad Malik (CTO), have taken the CliQr vision of enabling developers to deploy workloads onto any public or private cloud and extended it to containerized versions of those environments as well as new ones including onto bare metal servers, at network edge locations and in traditional data centers. With Dave Cope (Chief Revenue & Marketing Officer) and Gaurav Manglik (board member, investor, and former CliQr CEO), the band really has been brought back together.
Market Timing: Like many other major trends in IT like virtualization or VoIP, K8s is experiencing successive waves of innovation which are giving rise to a new crop of start-ups such as Spectro Cloud. Initial deployments of K8s have been limited by multiple factors: the technical skills of a DevOps team, a particular cloud environment, and the monitoring tools on hand just to name a few. Enterprises are now looking to scale their K8s deployments, a trend very much accelerated by the pandemic, to new and larger workloads in multiple clusters. Furthermore, we’re seeing widespread multi-cloud and hybrid cloud adoption – a complexity that Spectro Cloud is well suited to address – as each BU within an enterprise selects the best cloud strategy for its products and customers. Finally, some DevOps thought leaders are exploring K8s deployments directly on bare metal environments thus avoiding the tax of virtualization software. Spectro Cloud’s product offering is able to capitalize on all of these trends.
Product: Spectro Cloud’s crack technical team has thoughtfully engineered a product architecture that enables application developers to pick from a set of mix-and-match templates to create profiles for container workloads enabling rapid and scalable multi-cluster, multi-cloud deployments regardless of the underlying K8s distributions. With its growing list of integrations and leveraging CNCF’s Cluster API project, Spectro Cloud is able to stay on top of an ever-changing environment. Based on Alter’s knowledge of the K8s landscape, we feel that Spectro Cloud’s technical prowess and its product architecture are a winning combination.
Customer Traction: The proof is in the pudding, as is commonly said. During the course of our year-long engagement with the Spectro Cloud team, we have been impressed by the inroads that the company has made with customers ranging from enterprises to carriers. Most importantly, the executive team has delivered on the goals that they have set for themselves and their stakeholders with customer wins and strong traction at all stages of their sales pipeline. We are looking forward to more good news from Spectro Cloud in the coming quarters!
For more insights on Spectro Cloud’s financing, please visit Tenry Fu’s blog post.
