cloudquery Raises $3.5M Seed Funding - Open Source Cloud Visibility

Cloud Asset Management Simplified with CloudQuery

Managing infrastructure across multiple cloud environments presents a significant challenge for developers, often necessitating the creation of bespoke scripting solutions. CloudQuery, a nascent startup, was founded to address this issue, and has developed an open-source tool designed to automate this process. The company recently announced the successful completion of a $3.5 million seed funding round, spearheaded by Boldstart Ventures, with additional investment from Work-Bench, Mango Capital, and Haystack.

The Genesis of CloudQuery

Yevgeny Pats, CEO and co-founder of CloudQuery, describes the tool as an “open source, cloud assets inventory [tool] powered by SQL.” His motivation for creating CloudQuery stemmed from personal experience during his previous venture, Fuzzit, which was acquired by GitLab. He encountered difficulties in mapping and understanding his infrastructure’s configuration across various cloud platforms.

Surprisingly, Pats discovered a lack of readily available open-source solutions to tackle this problem. Existing options didn’t offer the level of visibility needed by developers employing infrastructure-as-code practices, particularly those utilizing tools like Terraform from HashiCorp.

A SQL-Based Approach to Cloud Visibility

Recognizing this gap, Pats initiated the development of CloudQuery. “We want to become this platform and to build this ecosystem where developers can focus solely on the business and security logic with a query engine that they know, [SQL], and they don’t need to learn a new one to [put] together business and security objectives,” Pats clarified.

Launched less than a year ago, the tool has already garnered significant interest. Prominent organizations, including Bloomberg, Salesforce, and Zendesk, have adopted CloudQuery, leveraging its capabilities to reduce the manual effort associated with infrastructure scripting.

Rapid Adoption and Future Plans

“[Earlier this year], I just released it on GitHub and launched it on Hacker News, and within three months we got quite a bit of traction and adoption from developers, DevOps engineers and SREs [site reliability engineers], and I decided to raise money and double down on that opportunity to continue expanding and developing the open source project,” Pats stated.

The company’s monetization strategy prioritizes community growth. The long-term plan involves the introduction of a SaaS offering that simplifies the use of the open-source tool and provides specialized features tailored to the needs of enterprise clients.

Team Growth and Remote Work Philosophy

Currently, CloudQuery comprises a team of 11 employees, with plans to expand to 14 by the beginning of next year. The open-source nature of the project facilitates community contributions and enables a lean operational model. Pats emphasizes the benefits of a fully remote work environment in fostering a diverse workforce, while acknowledging the challenges of a competitive hiring landscape.

Drawing on his experiences at GitLab, Pats intends to maintain a fully remote structure and implement best practices for team collaboration. Specifically, he plans to organize teams around compatible time zones to facilitate effective communication and meetings, mitigating the difficulties inherent in globally distributed teams.