Stacklet, the company building a commercial offering based on the Cloud Custodian open-source cloud governance initiative, announced today that it has secured $18 million in Series A financing. Addition spearheaded the investment, with Foundation Capital and new individual investor Liam Randall also participating. Randall will assume the role of VP of business development at Stacklet. Both Addition and Foundation Capital previously contributed to Stacklet’s seed funding round, which was revealed last August. This latest investment increases the company’s aggregate funding to $22 million.

Stacklet empowers organizations to effectively oversee their data governance strategies across multiple cloud environments, accounts, policies, and geographic regions, with a primary emphasis on security enhancements, cost reduction, and adherence to regulatory requirements. The platform provides users with pre-configured policy sets that embody recommended practices for accessing cloud resources, while also allowing for the creation of customized rules. Furthermore, Stacklet delivers analytical capabilities for monitoring policy effectiveness and auditing resources, alongside real-time inventory and change management logs for an organization’s cloud holdings.

The company’s founders are Travis Stanfield (CEO) and Kapil Thangavelu (CTO), both of whom possess substantial experience in the industry. Stanfield previously held engineering positions at Microsoft and DealerTrack Technologies, while Thangavelu contributed to Canonical and, most recently, Amazon’s AWSOpen team. Thangavelu is also a key originator of the Cloud Custodian project, which originated at Capital One—where the two founders first connected—and is now a project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

“When I began my tenure at Capital One, the organization had committed to a complete transition to the cloud and the closure of its data centers,” Thangavelu explained. “I was involved from the outset of this transition, and Custodian emerged as a parallel project, addressing the governance and security challenges faced by large, regulated enterprises as they migrate to the cloud.”

The acceleration of cloud adoption spurred by the pandemic has heightened the demand for solutions such as Stacklet’s. While the company has not disclosed the majority of its clientele, it has identified FICO as a design partner. Stacklet’s target market isn’t limited to large enterprises, however. “We can provide value once an organization’s cloud infrastructure reaches a scale where it’s beyond the comprehension of any single individual,” the company states, “and whether that’s through the open-source project or through Stacklet, we can offer a suitable solution.” The Cloud Custodian open-source project is already widely utilized by substantial enterprises, which also benefits Stacklet’s growth.

“In a mere 8 months, Travis and Kapil have transformed an initial concept into a fully-fledged team of 15, secured early design partnerships with Fortune 2000 companies, and are making significant progress in developing the Stacklet commercial platform,” noted Sid Trivedi of Foundation Capital. “They’ve accomplished all of this while working remotely during an unprecedented global pandemic. This level of progress is precisely what investors seek in an early-stage venture.”

The team intends to allocate the new funding towards continued product development, with general availability anticipated later this year, expansion of both its engineering and sales/marketing teams, and further cultivation of the open-source community surrounding Cloud Custodian.