Stacklet co-founders Travis Stanfield and Kapil Thangavelu met while both were working at Capital One several years ago. Thangavelu helped create the Cloud Custodian open source cloud governance project. The two eventually got together and decided to build a startup based on that project, and today the company was covertly launched with an initial investment of $ 4.4 million from Foundation Capital and Addition Ventures.
Standfield, who is CEO of the young startup, says Cloud Custodian was born when Capital One was transitioning to a full cloud approach around 2013. As the company looked for ways to manage compliance and governance, it found that organizations like theirs lo they were forced to do one-off scripts and were looking for a way that could be repeatable and scalable.
"Cloud Custodian was developed as a way to understand what all those one-time scripts were doing, looking at the cloud control plane, finding the interesting set of resources, and then taking sensitive action on them," he explained.
After leaving Capital One and going in different directions for a while, the two got together this year to start Stacklet as a way to nurture the underlying open source project Thangavelu helped build and build a trading company to add some functionality to make it easier for businesses to implement and understand.
While cloud administrators can download and understand how to use raw open source, Stacklet is attempting to make it easier by providing an administrative layer to manage usage across thousands of cloud accounts along with prepackaged sets of common types of out-of-compliance requirements. the box, analysis to understand how the tool is doing and what it is finding in terms of problems, and finally a resource database to understand all the cloud resources under management.
The company has 8 employees including the two founders and hopes to add more in the coming months. The open source project has 270 contributors from around the world. The startup is trying to build diversity by being completely remote. Not being limited by geography means they can hire from anywhere and this can help lead to a more diverse group of employees.
The founders admit it's a tough time to start a company and raise money, but on the plus side it wasn't necessary to be on a plane to San Francisco every week during the process.
Indeed Sid Trivedi, partner of Foundation Capital he said this was his first investment in which he never met the founders in person, but said through lengthy discussions he learned "their passion for the opportunity at hand, the experience of market dynamics. and the vision of how they would solve the problem of meeting the needs of both IT / security administrators and developers. "
