Cast.ai announced a $7.7 million seed round from TA Ventures, DNX, Florida Funders, and other unnamed angels to keep building on the idea of getting the benefits from all cloud providers in one simple setup. The round closed in June, TechCrunch reports.
Currently, the company employs 25 people, with four new hires in the pipeline. By the end of 2021, Cast.ai plans to double the number of employees to 50 people.
What is Cast.ai
Yuri Frayman, CEO and co-founder of the company, says that they started the company with the idea that developers should be able to get the best of each of the public clouds without being locked in. They do this by creating Kubernetes clusters that are able to span multiple clouds.
“Cast does not require you to do anything except for launching your application. You don’t need to know […] what cloud you are using [at any given time]. You don’t need to know anything except to identify the application, identify which [public] cloud providers you would like to use, the percentage of each [cloud provider’s] use and launch the application,” Frayman explained.
This means that you could use Amazon’s RDS database and Google’s ML engine, and the solution decides how to make that work based on your requirements and price. You set the policies when you are ready to launch and Cast will take care of distributing it for you in the location and providers that you desire, or that makes most sense for your application.
“The company takes advantage of cloud-native technologies, containerization, and Kubernetes to break the proprietary barriers that exist between clouds,” says company co-founder Laurent Gil. “We break these barriers of cloud providers so that an application does not need to sit in one place anymore. It can sit in several [providers] at the same time. And this is great for the Kubernetes application because they’re kind of designed with this [flexibility] in mind,” Gil said.
Developers use the policy engine to decide how much they want to control this process. They can simply set location and let Cast optimize the application across clouds automatically, or they can select at a granular level exactly the resources they want to use on which cloud. Regardless of how they do it, Cast will continually monitor the installation and optimize based on cost to give them the cheapest options available for their configuration.
“We invested in Cast.ai, because there shouldn’t be a monopoly for cloud services in the real world. The more options developers have while building new products, the more reliable products they would release at the end of the day. It’s a clear win for a tech community and a huge leap toward cloud independency”, – TA Ventures Partner Oleg Malenkov said.