Cloud Governance Platform Company Stacklet Raises $18 Million in Series A Funding

By Dan Anderson ● Jan 18, 2021
  • Stacklet — a developer of the cloud governance platform based on Cloud Custodian — recently announced it has closed $18 million in Series A funding. These are the details.

Stacklet — a developer of the cloud governance platform based on Cloud Custodian — recently announced it has closed $18 million in Series A funding. This investment was led by Addition with participation from Foundation Capital and new individual investor Liam Randall. And the funds are earmarked for continuing the support and growth of the Cloud Custodian community, advancing the Stacklet platform, and hiring in engineering, marketing, sales and customer success.

Stacklet had exited stealth in August 2020. And the company has developed a real-time cloud asset database, added hundreds of policies to its Policy Packs, and signed multiple design partners for its cloud governance platform. Cloud Custodian was downloaded over 2 million times since August 2020 and has almost 300 active contributors including Amazon, Microsoft and Capital One. 

Randall joined the leadership team at the company as the VP of business development. Along with investing in early-stage companies, Randall is a long-time security executive and was most recently the vice president of software innovation at Capital One.

Cloud Custodian is trusted for providing unparalleled cloud security and cost optimization by thousands of well-known global brands. And Cloud Custodian takes a policy as code approach to governing infrastructure to keep organizations secure and well-managed in the cloud. Plus it has the broadest coverage of cloud services and remediation capabilities and supports multi-cloud real-time governance using the native serverless capabilities of each cloud provider. The Cloud Custodian community is working to “shift left” the open source core. And this introduces preventative control by giving developers the ability to evaluate both application and infrastructure code against their organization’s governance standards early in the lifecycle.

Stacklet is continuing to lead and maintain the Cloud Custodian project and to engage with users to expand the community and increase contributors. And Stacklet simplifies the scale and administration of Cloud Custodian and has developed an out-of-the-box solution with powerful management capabilities, asset visibility, Policy Packs, and other advanced features to help businesses realize value.

KEY QUOTES:

“We made our seed investment in Stacklet because we believed in Travis and Kapil’s vision and saw the great potential of Cloud Custodian. Stacklet has consistently delivered, innovated and hit its milestones. We’re thrilled to build on our initial investment and continue to support the company on its journey.”

— Lee Fixel, founder, Addition

“We are continuing to innovate the way we do cloud and how we manage access, control, governance and costs. We like to foster innovation by working with disruptive, early-stage startups and think Stacklet aligns very well to our roadmap.”

— Hilik Kotler, CISO, FICO

“Organizations are moving to the cloud faster than we expected due to COVID-19 which has resulted in cloud governance and costs needing to be better addressed and managed. This has created an exciting opportunity for Stacklet and the Cloud Custodian community. Stacklet is committed to ensuring that Cloud Custodian provides the world’s best cloud governance platform and to continuing its free distribution. We look forward to working with industry partners, and in particular the major cloud providers, to ensure its widespread adoption.”

— Travis Stanfield, co-founder and CEO, Stacklet

“Our continued investment in Stacklet reflects our strong confidence in its business model and in Cloud Custodian which we see as an exciting technology with unparalleled opportunities in the enterprise market. Cloud Custodian’s ability to improve server utilization and decrease IT costs and administration time make it an extremely attractive offering. We look forward to working with the team at Stacklet to help position it as the must-have technology in the enterprise for organizations moving to the cloud.”

— Sid Trivedi, partner, Foundation Capital

“Working in security with innovative software startups over the past 20 years and seeing a number of deployments of new infrastructure has made me incredibly focused on the solidity of new technologies and their security. I joined Stacklet because of the tremendous market opportunity they have to become the de facto standard for cloud governance. I look forward to strengthening this position while developing the necessary partnerships to accelerate the adoption of Cloud Custodian to build a strong community for it within the CNCF.”

— Liam Randall