emma is an innovative cloud management platform transforming how businesses optimize and scale their cloud infrastructure. Pulse 2.0 interviewed emma founder and CEO Dmitry Panenkov to learn more about the company.
Dmitry Panenkov’s Background
What is Dmitry Panenkov’s background? Panenkov said:
“Throughout my career, I held key positions at industry leaders such as Arista Networks, Allot Communications, and Juniper Networks. It was during this time that I recognized the widening gap in the cloud computing market. Dominated by giants like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, the industry left many businesses trapped in vendor lock-in. Even for those who were not tied in, the complexity of managing multi-cloud infrastructures became a daunting challenge, leading to inefficiencies, increased security vulnerabilities, and rising operational costs. It is this realization that led to emma.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for emma come together? Panenkov shared:
“In 2019, I assembled a team of talented experts with a shared vision: to build a platform that simplifies and automates cloud management. Our goal was to empower companies to seamlessly manage multiple cloud providers and environments through a single, user-friendly interface. Driven by a clear mission, we set out to create a solution that makes cloud management effortless, efficient, and secure: emma, which stands for Enterprise Multicloud Management Application.’”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for emma so far? Panenkov reflected:
“My favorite memory so far was our first team meeting in Dubai last year after closing our Series A funding round. Almost all our employees attended from all over the world! We held presentations, conferences, and brainstorming sessions. We also had a huge gala dinner with music and dancing. It was wonderful for everyone to meet in person and enjoy that time together – communication between teams improved significantly after that, and we’re looking forward to the next one already.”
Core Products
What are emma’s core products and features? Panenkov explained:
“emma empowers organizations of all sizes to build and manage cloud infrastructure seamlessly across diverse environments – on-premises, private, and public – and across providers, from hyperscalers to niche and EU regional offerings. With AI-driven features, emma enables users to deploy, manage, optimize, and govern cloud resources efficiently. From a single, intuitive interface, users can oversee performance, control costs, and ensure effective resource utilization with ease.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Panenkov and the team face in building the company? Panenkov acknowledged:
“Everyone always faces challenges. At emma, we don’t focus on the ones we cannot change; we work on overcoming the ones we can. We always rely on each other. What we have truly mastered is the ability to sense opportunities before they even become reality. We dream big and see a broader perspective – this helps us play Go while everyone else is playing 2D chess.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has emma’s technology evolved since launching? Panenkov noted:
“Today, emma includes intelligent AI/ML-powered capabilities assisting the user with cost optimization, performance improvement, security enhancement, and predicting resource needs, making cloud operations more efficient.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of emma’s most significant milestones? Panenkov cited:
“In 2021 emma was founded in Luxembourg. By end-2021, we had launched our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) – a platform designed to help businesses of all sizes to effortlessly monitor, control, and optimize their cloud environments, all built upon and supported by its own robust multi-cloud network backbone.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Panenkov about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“A British e-vehicle company was utilizing quantitative sustainability metrics to guide decisions on design and manufacturing. This analysis involved the use of complex mathematical models and algorithms, demanding significant computing resources for execution.”
“For each recalculation of the mathematical models required for production, a single-cloud Kubernetes cluster called upon reserved instances from a single public cloud provider to power their computational needs. While efficient, this approach was very costly.”
“The company then began to use the emma platform and set up a multi-cloud redundant Kubernetes cluster benefitting from:
- Auto–scaling using spot instances from different CSPs
- Using spot-based autoscaling node groups to minimize total cluster costs
- User-friendly management through the Kubernetes dashboard
This resulted in 80% cost reduction and significantly improved fault tolerance.”
Funding
When asking Panenkov about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“In March 2023, emma secured $6 million in seed funding in a round led by RTP Global, with participation from CircleRock Capital and AltaIR Capital. RTP Global’s notable early-stage investments include Datadog, Delivery Hero, SumUp and Cred. To keep up with demand, emma raised a $17 million Series A funding round in October 2024, led by Belgian Smartfin, a leading European venture capital firm, with participation from RTP Global and existing investors.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is emma pursuing? Panenkov assessed:
“The hybrid cloud market is expected to reach $158.37 billion by 2025.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates emma from its competition? Panenkov affirmed:
“emma is the only fully agnostic platform enabling a ‘true multi-cloud strategy’ as emma empowers its users to deploy cloud infrastructure across various environments (on-prem, private and public) and providers – hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP), niche and specialized (e.g. DigitalOcean, Alibaba, Oracle Cloud) and European providers (e.g. Gcore, Leaseweb).”
“emma is the only no-code technology in the industry, democratizing cloud use and accelerating cloud adoption by enabling IT professionals and business users alike to use cloud environments, all without the need for code modification.”
“emma provides cloud connectivity through its own multi-cloud networking backbone establishing secure connections, enforcing network policies, and optimizing traffic routing, resulting in resilient and highly available network architectures.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of emma’s future company goals? Panenkov concluded:
“We aim to be the go-to cloud management platform, empowering businesses with seamless access to cloud resources from any provider or environment. By setting vendor-neutral standards, we enhance reliability, performance, security, and cost efficiency, unlocking new opportunities for innovation and growth.”
