Sierra Ventures Early-Stage Investment in Spectro Cloud

Sierra Ventures Early-Stage Investment in Spectro Cloud

Written by

Mark Fernandes

Published on

March 17, 2020

We are excited to announce our investment in Spectro Cloud’s $7.5M seed round.Spectro Cloud is a Silicon Valley-based startup that is bringing control and flexibility to enterprise Kubernetes deployments. They have developed orchestration technology and a SaaS management system that brings the ease of Kubernetes as a service offers to enterprises that need more control over their own Kubernetes infrastructure stacks. After carefully investigating the landscape, our investment in Spectro was driven by the following reasons:

  1. Containers are moving into production and Kubernetes is how those containers are being orchestrated. Containers and cluster management have fundamentally changed how applications are architected and deployed, a huge shift in IT.
  2. As you can see from the Sierra Ventures 2020 CXO Tech Survey Results, Kubernetes is a high priority for over 60% of enterprise customers as almost 75% of CXOs have multi-cloud plans. Many enterprises are still figuring out how to effectively run and maintain Kubernetes in production. Kubernetes brings to bear powerful technology for container cluster management but it is not easy to make Kubernetes production-ready.
  3. On top of needing solutions that provide end-to-end lifecycle management for Kubernetes, we believe enterprises still need control of their infrastructure. Spectro Cloud provides that control and flexibility to the enterprise.
  4. Most enterprises have multiple Kubernetes clusters, sometimes even in multi-cloud environments. Having a unified control plane delivers a consistent management experience across multiple clusters and clouds.
  5. Spectro Cloud’s team, headed by Tenry Fu, previously co-founder and CTO of multi-cloud management platform startup CliQr Technologies (acquired by Cisco in 2016), is world-class and brings deep enterprise cloud experience to the table.

While cloud-native applications and supporting infrastructure are still early, we see the area as one where big ideas can help accelerate the market. Containers and container cluster management infrastructure are going to underpin the next applications and we’re excited to support Spectro Cloud in making that infrastructure accessible to all.