appCD is a company that generates infrastructure from code automatically based on application code with golden standards applied. Pulse 2.0 interviewed appCD co-founder and CEO Sachin Aggarwal to learn more about the company.
Sachin Aggarwal’s Background
What is Aggarwal’s background? Aggarwal said:
“My background is deeply rooted in entrepreneurship, with a focus on launching and scaling ventures. Most recently I founded Accurics and steered it to a significant accomplishment—its acquisition by Tenable, marking a highlight in my career. Prior to Accurics, I co-founded and led Layered Insight, guiding it until its successful acquisition by Qualys.”
“In addition to these ventures, I played a key role in the founding of Jvion, which was acquired by JMI Equity, and Reventics, which found a new home with Omega Healthcare, a company affiliated with Goldman Sachs. I also co-founded Soltius Global, a company with its roots in Singapore, and I took on the leadership role as CEO of Teledata Technologies Solutions.”
Formation Of appCD
How did the idea for appCD come together? Aggarwal shared:
“The idea for our company emerged from the challenges my co-founder, Asif Awan, and I encountered in containerized security. We joined forces in 2023, drawing on our experiences at Accurics and our work with large enterprises, to address the complexities of deploying applications.”
“Recognizing that Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become the standard for provisioning infrastructure, we also acknowledged its vulnerability to human errors and misconfigurations due to manual processes. Believing there was a more efficient way to write IaC that could avoid repetitive mistakes without relying on templates, we aimed to decouple IaC creation from the application deployment lifecycle.”
“This led to the development of appCD, our generative infrastructure from code solution. By leveraging application code, appCD automatically generates the IaC, applying best practices and standards by default, thus streamlining the deployment process.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Aggarwal reflected:
“Although our company is still in its infancy stage, having been founded in July 2023, we’ve already had some remarkable moments. What I’ve been thrilled about is hiring exceptional people. It started with the hiring of Cesar Rodriguez as our VP of Engineering, who I had the pleasure of working with previously at Accurics. Following that, we brought on Kunal Dabir as our VP of Engineering in India to spearhead our operations from our Pune office.”
“The momentum continued with the addition of key roles in product and go-to-market strategies, including Lauren Rother and Danielle Cook. And we’ve rounded out the team with the addition of Arshad Sayyad, Chief Business Officer. The strength of a company lies in its people and the culture it fosters. Watching these incredibly talented individuals come together and collaborate has been exceptionally rewarding for me.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Aggarwal explained:
“appCD generates Infrastructure from Code automatically based on application code with golden standards applied. Unlike manual IaC creation or ‘golden’ templates, appCD auto-generates IaC from the application code itself to standardize and streamline cloud deployments.”
“No application source code changes are needed or new programming language to learn. It removes SDLC bottlenecks, minimizes liabilities and eliminates cognitive overload. With appCD, users analyze, visualize and generate IaC:
- Analyze: Reviews Python and Java code to understand infrastructure and cloud dependencies and infer API, service configuration, ingress/egress, environment variables.
- Visualize: Creates a view of the deployment architecture, enabling users to enhance it with simple drag and drop functionality and connections with guardrails, validating resources.
- Generate: Creates Terraform or Helm charts based on the application’s inferred cloud dependencies and automatically applies golden standards at creation, complying with HIPAA, NIST-CSF, PCI, GDPR regulations.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Aggarwal and the team faced in building the company? Aggarwal acknowledged:
“Recently, one of the main challenges we’ve encountered in our sector is pinpointing the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), a common hurdle for any startup. However, the key to overcoming this challenge has been maintaining an open-minded approach by actively listening to our prospects, customers, and our team. This receptive stance is essential for any startup to find the right Product Market Fit.”
Evolution Of appCD’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Aggarwal noted:
“appCD is a new approach to solving the challenges of Infrastructure as Code. Our Infrastructure from Code solution launched in early March. We are spending time with our early adopters to enhance the early access edition of appCD.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Aggarwal cited:
“In just six months, appCD was able to build a very talented team and attract tier-1 investors who understand our space and launch our first product. We are particularly proud of our speed of execution. We’ve announced support for Azure and AWS Lambda and intend on continuing this momentum with additional features.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Aggarwal about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“We are currently working with early adopters of appCD and have garnered support from over a dozen enterprises that have early access to our product. The below testimonials underscore the transformative effect appCD is having on simplifying and securing the deployment process, thereby enabling teams to focus on innovation and delivering value to their customers:
- ‘The holy grail of accelerating deployment of applications in the cloud requires the ability to create the infrastructure as code in an automated, secure way with least privileges, and aligned to architectural best practices. appCD is closest to making this vision happen right from application code itself and bringing stellar value to platform teams.’ Vishal Gupta, CIO and CTO, Lexmark International
- ‘The complexity of managing cloud systems is increasing with constantly evolving security, resiliency, and compliance requirements. This complexity manifests as significant cognitive load for development teams. appCD is attacking this problem directly by reducing the toil associated with application deployment and cloud infrastructure lifecycle management so that developers can focus on delivering customer value.’ Brandon Leach, Senior Director – Developer Enablement at a Top 10 Software Company
- ‘In the world of continuous deployment, where we blend innovation with efficiency, appCD has come up with a unique way to generate infrastructure deployment pipelines by looking at your code repository. It checks your code repo and automatically picks out IAM policies that you might miss.’ Jishnu Kinwar, VP Engineering, Chamberlain Group”
Funding
After asking Aggarwal about the company’s funding information, he revealed:
“With our recent launch, we proudly announced a $6 million seed funding round, secured from distinguished venture capital firms: Thomvest Ventures, Westwave Capital, FireBolt Ventures, and Secure Octane. This seed funding is pivotal for us, enabling accelerated product development, the implementation of our go-to-market strategy, and overall company expansion.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Aggarwal assessed:
“The company is targeting a rapidly expanding total addressable market (TAM), fueled by the accelerating adoption of cloud technologies. As organizations continue to deploy applications in the cloud with an ever-increasing need for speed, the demand for Infrastructure from Code solutions like appCD is growing significantly.”
“Presently, with over 100 million developers on GitHub and the burgeoning trend of cloud-native development amplified by Generative AI and Co-Pilots, our TAM is witnessing considerable expansion. This growth trajectory places us in a market size comparable to some of the largest cloud vendors, indicating a substantial opportunity for appCD to lead and innovate within this space.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Aggarwal affirmed:
“What sets our company apart from the competition is our user-centric approach to cloud deployment. We understand that asking teams to rewrite their code or learn a new programming language for cloud deployment is impractical and often meets resistance.”
“That’s why we designed appCD to seamlessly integrate into existing deployment lifecycles. Unlike other solutions in the market that require teams to adapt to new methodologies, our focus is on minimizing disruption by ensuring appCD complements the tools and processes our users are already familiar with.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Aggarwal concluded:
“Our vision is to enable any user to securely deploy applications to any cloud without delay by being application-centric, cloud-agnostic and developer-first.”
