Spectro Cloud announced the completion of its Series A funding round, amounting to $20M, which is led by Stripes, a leading investor in software and consumer products.

Prior to this current investment round, Spectro Cloud had previously raised $7.5 million in seed funding from Sierra Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, WestWave Capital and Firebolt Ventures, all of which also participated in the current Series A funding round. Additional Series A investors include T-Mobile Ventures and Alter Venture Partners. Spectro Cloud will use the current investment to fuel the continued expansion of its direct and partner sales and support channels both in the U.S. and internationally. Further, Spectro Cloud will continually focus on adding top engineering talent to improve its product and services for customers - arming them with the features they need to grow and capitalize on new technologies that enable them to leverage new innovation for businesses and markets.

"We have seen Kubernetes rapidly evolve from primarily developer-focused DIY projects, followed by the entrance of large vendors offering siloed Kubernetes platforms, to finally, today's desire by organizations to unleash the true potential of Kubernetes in a way that is highly accessible, manageable and scalable in real production environments," said Spectro Cloud CEO and Co-founder Tenry Fu. 

Next-Gen Platform Delivers Kubernetes Management Without Operational Headaches

Organizations today are using containerization to accelerate application development and delivery and continuously build competitiveness, customer intimacy and business resiliency. Kubernetes, which has emerged as the de facto container orchestration technology, promises to free applications from the constraints of infrastructure, allowing them to be developed and deployed anywhere - across data centers, public clouds and edge locations. While the timing is ideal for the open source technology, the reality is that it is still challenging for organizations to operationalize and integrate with important adjacent tools and processes including security, compliance, and governance, especially in production environments.

"Cloud native is a central component of enterprise DevOps, with containers deemed most critical to application development and deployment processes (55%)," according to Jay Lyman, senior research analyst with the Cloud Native and Applied Infrastructure and DevOps Channels at 451 (Voice of the Enterprise: DevOps, Workloads & Key, Projects 2021, 451 Research). "The main challenges of cloud native are security and compliance concerns (54%), cost (42%) and complexity (40%)."

Spectro Cloud changes all of this. It provides a complete and integrated platform that enables organizations to easily manage the full lifecycle of any combination of new or existing, simple or complex multi-cluster, multi-distribution Kubernetes environments - whether in data center, cloud, bare metal or edge environments. Spectro Cloud gives IT teams complete visibility, control and production-scale efficiencies to deliver highly-curated, IT-administered or self-service Kubernetes stacks and tools to developers based on their specific needs while maintaining granular governance, access control and security the business requires. Its approach harnesses the power and scale of open-source technologies such as Cloud Native Computing Foundation's Cluster API, which is uniquely extended and incorporated within Spectro Cloud's platform, to directly address enterprise requirements at scale.

Investor Perspectives on Series A Funding Round

"At Stripes, we are continually looking for truly amazing products and teams that are obsessed with disrupting big and important markets that can in turn help their customers fundamentally transform their businesses," said Stripes Founder Ken Fox. "We look at Spectro Cloud as residing within  the unique intersection between novel Kubernetes technology coupled with its delivery akin to consumer products. This allows Kubernetes to become approachable and manageable to a tremendously large addressable market that has, to date, had much of its adoption throttled by limited access to scarce Kubernetes skills."

"In many ways, Kubernetes can be viewed as the bridge between a company and the applications it uses to create a lasting and positive experience with its customers," said Mark Fernandez, managing partner at Sierra Ventures. "Having said this, you can look at a variety of analyses and see that Kubernetes have not yet reached their full potential due to being viewed as complex and hard to operate black boxes for those without deep knowledge about the internals. We are very pleased to have been both an early Seed and Series A investor in Spectro Cloud because we saw a unique technology approach that clearly stands apart from other vendor approaches coupled with intuitive experience and delivered by a proven team that can now finally bring Kubernetes to the masses."