Spectro Cloud announced the closing of a $40 million Series B funding round, led by New York City-based Stripes, a leading investor in software and consumer products.

Other investors participating in the round included Sierra Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, WestWave Capital, T-Mobile Ventures and Alter Venture Partners, all of which also participated in the $20 million Series A funding round that Spectro Cloud closed in July. Additionally, TSG has invested in this Series B round.

"This investment validates Spectro Cloud's vision and accomplishments toward making Kubernetes more accessible and manageable so organizations can speed up adoption in any environment," said Tenry Fu, Spectro Cloud co-founder and CEO. "Our approach with Palette is simple: to remove the common pitfalls and trade-offs that organizations face when adopting Kubernetes. Spectro Cloud's recent Palette Edge and Palette Bare Metal announcements  demonstrate our ability to extend a unique approach to every environment under management - even the most challenging ones. The fresh capital will enable us to develop more features, and expand our go-to-market plan internationally to address customer demand."

Spectro Cloud's next-generation Palette Kubernetes management platform delivers full-stack lifecycle management. That includes any combination of new and existing Kubernetes clusters, be they virtualized or bare metal data centers, public clouds or edge locations. 

Spectro Cloud announced its Real Metal architecture in October, and its extension to add support for edge locations on March 15. The company's Palette Edge, Palette Bare Metal, Palette Cloud, Palette Standard and Palette Premium products allow organizations to deploy and manage any type of Kubernetes cluster across any location. 

According to 451 Research Senior Research Analyst, Jay Lyman, who wrote in the Voice of Enterprise: DevOps, Organizational Dynamics - Advisory Report, "As cloud-native deployments evolve both in the industry and inside organizations - now encompassing more than just web applications to include more data-rich and mission-critical workloads - many organizations are now leveraging containers via cloud services, operating systems and bare metal without VMs, which can impact both efficiency and costs."

Palette's key capabilities include:

• Unified full-stack lifecycle management beyond the Kubernetes infrastructure, spanning the operating system, applications and add-on services;
• Support for any Kubernetes environment, encompassing any Kubernetes distribution, operating system and combination of integrations in any location;
• Pre-validated, pre-tested stacks to ensure compatibility across all layers and integrations, enabling support of multiple development teams and application projects with zero configuration-drift risk;
• End-to-end automated operations from day 0 to day 2 tasks for each cluster, such as granular RBAC, self-healing and cost optimization; and,
• An industry-unique approach for bare metal data centers and edge locations that allows IT teams to easily deploy and manage any cluster's full stack with a cloud-like experience based on a low-touch, plug-and-play setup and the ability to scale to thousands of clusters.
  

"We are extremely pleased to lead Spectro Cloud's Series B financing," said Stripes founder and Partner Ken Fox. "Stripes also led Spectro Cloud's Series A financing last summer. Since then, the company has shown tremendous traction, and quickly built brand awareness, leading to large, blue-chip customers. This is a testament to Stripes' focus on investing in amazing products. Spectro Cloud has executed well in their expansion to include a global direct and partner sales organization, as well as recent product innovations such as the extension of its Palette platform to support K8s on bare metal and edge locations."

Spectro Cloud has raised $67.5 million to date. That total includes the close of a $7.5 million seed round in 2019 in addition to the $20 million Series A round previously mentioned. With the new funding, Spectro Cloud plans to hire 50 new positions by the end of the year, including salespeople, marketing personnel, sales engineers, solutions architects, engineers and customer support - making the company's current 24/7 customer support even more robust. Spectro Cloud's headquarters is in San Jose, California. It also boasts a presence in Germany, India, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

"The next step in our goal of simplifying complex technologies and making them consumable is to make it easier for dev teams to deploy and scale faster by integrating additional application services ‘up the stack,'" Fu said. "Running and optimizing multi-cluster workloads with out-of-the-box integrations for service mesh or platform services, such as databases, is something we have already in the roadmap. At the same time, we will continue working with customers to address the challenge of unifying and consistently managing the infrastructure until we completely remove that pain point - underscoring our commitment to making K8s more accessible and manageable by every organization and team."

Spectro Cloud has differentiated itself in the Kubernetes management market by solving a problem that has plagued the K8s ecosystem since inception: the trade-off between control and flexibility. That give and take is reflected in the transition from DIY Kubernetes platforms, mainly used for testing, and commercial solutions run in production environments. Palette eliminates the tension between the two groups by offering IT teams the control and enterprise-class governance they need without limiting the development teams' vision of what their Kubernetes environment should look like or where it runs.

Spectro Cloud's unique approach to address the tension between the two groups consists of automated declarative management that extends one of the most popular open source, community-backed CNCF projects - Cluster API - to include and unify management of K8s infrastructure, applications and services. Constant reconciliation loops ensure zero configuration drift, enabling development teams to select or on-board any integration required with broad functionality support from day 0 to day 2 operations.