Cloud Cost Management Startup Cloudyn Raises $4M

Cloud cost management and monitoring is a crowded space, but Cloudyn believes it offers unique value that will set it apart from the pack. The company has secured $4 million in its first institutional funding round, which will go toward expanding its market reach and the breadth of its product portfolio.

The round was led by Titanium Investments, existing investor RDSeed also participating.

Cloudyn CEO Sharon Wagner said Cloudyn had a technological edge in its ability to work across multiple clouds and strength in hybrid cloud.

One a user provides credentials, Cloudyn begins analyzing usage. “We look for optimal cost and performance,” Wagner said. “We look at resources between clouds, data centers. Forty-eight hours after we gather information, we provide a multi-dimensional view of performance and cost, allowing [the customer] to slice and dice. After 10 days of collecting information, we start to provide actionable recommendations. The first option is to optimize internally, then we also provide comparison and recommendations for workload migration and transition among clouds.”

Cloudyn started with cloud cost management for Amazon Web Services customers, like many companies in the space do, but has continuously added support for other clouds, such as Google Cloud Platform, Rackspace and IBM SoftLayer.  Wagner said the next big additions will be Microsoft Azure and VMware’s public cloud offering. “What we hear from clients is that Azure is taking off seriously with enterprises,” he said.

The company’s biggest install base (about 70 percent) is on AWS, which comes as no surprise given the cloud provider’s maturity. Cloudyn monitors approximately 8 percent of all instances on AWS, according to Wagner.

About 20 percent of Cloudyn's customers run on GCE and the rest on an OpenStack cloud. Rackspace's cloud is OpenStack-based, and SoftLayer, while not built on OpenStack, supports the open source cloud architecture.

In total, Wagner said, the company has over 2,400 clients, most of whom have significant cloud footprints of 250 concurrent instances and above.

Cloudyn provides visibility into hybrid and multi-cloud environments but will expand the breadth of what it can show users, according to Wagner. Expect the company to introduce more granular cost visibility, down to the cost of delivering the application itself. This is something that will appeal to CIOs looking to understand the true cost to deliver a specific service.

Cloudyn has doubled its revenue every quarter for the last six quarters, resulting in 400 percent year-over-year growth, according to the company. A team of 17, the equity will help it expand staff as well.