Fylamynt, a cloud automation platform, recently launched and announced its initial seed funding of $6.5 million in a round led by Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-Focused Venture Fund.  To learn more, VMblog spoke with the company's CEO and co-founder, Dr. Pradeep Padala.

VMblog:  Can you give us a quick one-sentence overview of the company?

Dr. Pradeep Padala:  Based in Silicon Valley, Fylamynt is a cloud automation platform that allows engineering teams to build, run and analyze automation workflows securely for any cloud with little to no code.

VMblog:  Tell us about why you started Fylamynt with your co founders.

Padala:   I started Fylamynt with my co-founders, Dr. Xiaoyun Zhu and David Lee, and we complement each other's expertise and skill sets very well. As a team, we have decades of experience in the area of infrastructure at both enterprise and consumer companies.

I previously co-founded ContainerX, an early container-management platform, which I sold to Cisco. Prior to that, I worked at VMWare and DOCOMO Labs. My cofunder, Dr. Xiaoyun Zhu, was my mentor for many years after I joined her team as a researcher at HP Labs. We later met our other cofounder, David, who has deep operational experience from working on some of the largest systems in the world at Facebook, EchoSign and SnapFish. I'm pleased to have such fantastic and expert co-founders with me on this journey.

In our research building the company, we found that the cost of operations is still very high in Fortune 1000 enterprises with application downtime costing an estimated $1.25 to $2.5 billion per year and the average cost per hour for critical application failures is $500,000 to $1 million. We created Fylamynt in 2019 to solve this problem and increase productivity and revenue for the enterprise. By augmenting workflows with AI, Fylamynt is a connector that automates any cloud workflow with any service and all code. Its modern workflow automation engine allows SREs to connect any infrastructure service to any code, including code written using Infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform and Ansible.

VMblog:  You just launched in early December with seed funding. Who are your investors?

Padala:  We're pleased to have several great investors on board to support us. Gradient Ventures, Google's AI fund, led our seed round of $6.5 million in seed funding which we recently announced. Additional investors in our company are Mango Capital and Point72 Ventures.

VMblog:  What is your company value proposition?

Padala:  Our mission is to automate and connect cloud workflows. We believe that automation is key to operating enterprise SaaS at scale with high availability, but the bottleneck in building automation is writing code. We built Fylamynt to help cloud engineers codify every aspect of their cloud workflow in minutes. Our modern cloud automation platform is flexible and powerful to solve any customer use case including automated remediation, governance, compliance, cost and performance management. Fylamynt's cloud provides a single orchestration engine to run any infrastructure code, while allowing the option of connecting to various services including DataDog, Splunk, PagerDuty, Slack and ServiceNow.

You can connect any service to any code using Fylamynt to:

●      Automatically Remediate a problem with (or without) a human in the loop

●      Run Terraform, Ansible and Python in a single workflow and pass data between them seamlessly

●      Save your cloud costs by scheduling cost management workflows that clean up resources every night

●      Use Slack for approvals and compliance workflows

●      Auto scale your infrastructure

Padala:  Our vision is to help engineers improve their productivity by codifying every part of their cloud workflow, so our target market is devops and cloud engineering teams. We listened to scores of on-call engineers, SREs, automation engineers, CIOs, VPs of IT - and heard that it takes a village to maintain high availability and hundreds of late-night hours to fix problems in cloud infrastructure. Every enterprise wants to operate at the efficiency of web-scale services like Amazon and Netflix. We believe that automation is the solution.

VMblog:  Who are some of your customers and do you have any partners?

Padala:  We want to bring cloud automation to every engineer in every enterprise. Therefore, our target customer is in enterprise space and we're fortunate to have worked with companies like data platform Snowflake during our initial beta period. We're thrilled to have their team on board and have appreciated their positive feedback so far. We're excited to announce some strategic and innovative partners in early 2021, so stay tuned for that announcement.

VMblog:  What is your GTM strategy?

Padala:  Our go to market strategy is a focus on bottom up content marketing to successfully reach our audience. We decided to kick off our company with a freemium model with a free-tier that is available forever- we're convinced that engineers will find value in what we offer. We recently launched our free tier program where anyone can sign-up with an email and start building workflows in minutes. If you're interested, sign up for that here.  I'd also like to note that our team is actively hiring for product management, marketing and engineering roles and interested candidates may please visit our careers page here.

Padala:  My prediction is that public cloud adoption will continue to rise at a rapid pace with many enterprises accelerating their digitization. These are exciting times for enterprise infrastructure with many enterprises realizing the benefits of automation. Our team at Fylamynt is excited to be a part of this industry and help set the stage for more growth and innovation.

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