Unusual Ventures and a collection of individual angel investors led a $4.1 million round investment in RunX, an early-stage firm that seeks to make it easier for developers to deploy cloud infrastructure.
According to Ankur Dahiya, co-founder and CEO of the company, the difficulty of managing cloud resources has increased as enterprises install new apps built on microservices and Kubernetes. His organization is seeking to develop a system that will simplify all aspects of cloud resource management, a capability that is currently only available to the largest software companies.
“The purpose of the company has been to provide any company the same kind of infrastructure leverage as digital giants like Google and Facebook, but without having to invest in a massive infrastructure DevOps team,” Dahiya told me.
Dahiya worked at Flexport for four years, while CTO Nitin Aggarwal worked at Google, Lyft, and Stripe, Both have experience managing engineering teams and assisting corporations with cloud infrastructure management, so they are familiar with the issue.
“What we’re doing is automating a lot of the DevOps effort in Kubernetes,” says the author. So there’s provisioning, monitoring, configuration, auto-scaling, and deployment covered. We’ve tried all of it together to make it feel like an out-of-the-box experience,” he explained. Developers can change the out-of-the-box setup if they like, but the company has found that for the most part, businesses can rely on the standard defaults because they apply to the great majority of customers.
For starters, it offers an open-source product called Opta, and RunX has a dozen beta/design partners. It will eventually charge for a product, but the specifics are still being worked out. It will most likely be an enterprise version with additional security built-in, a cloud service, or a hybrid of the two.
The company was founded a year ago, and the founders spent several months speaking with engineers before beginning to build the initial version of the product in January, which they finished in the spring and began working with early companies.
The company currently employs eight people, with plans to quadruple that number by the end of next year. Finding personnel, particularly skilled programmers, is a struggle for most technical businesses, but the company is working to develop a diverse and inclusive organization despite this.
“It’s really difficult early on. We received the majority of the early people through our networks. They were coworkers, members of a secretive network. It’s skewed toward archetype, so it’s been a challenge,” he explained. That said, he understands the necessity of assembling a more diverse staff, and he’s working on it when he searches for open roles in the future.
