We’re ready for the next chapter. Are you?

Time to level up (again)

Today we announced a new round of funding led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, along with our existing panel of investors. 

It’s the latest, and largest, in a series of raises following our Seed in March 2020, Series A in July 2021, Series B in March 2022.

Over the past year we’ve been pursued  by many enthusiastic prospective investors, waiting for the right one: one that shares our vision and our ambition, and knows our market inside-out. We’re honored to have found that match in Goldman Sachs. And what a partner!

Only 1 in 1,000 seed-funded startups ever make it to Series C. We’re no longer a startup, instead proud to join the ranks of technology growth businesses with blue-chip customers trusting us in mission-critical environments spanning a variety of industries — customers including GE HealthCare, RapidAI, T-Mobile, Nokia, the US Air Force and Navy, to name but a few. 

To get to this point (and to get there quicker than best-in-class) is a testament to the efforts of everyone at Spectro. We’ve proved that we have delivered to the Kubernetes management landscape what Kubernetes itself brought to applications: helping businesses realize its full potential across any environment.

Now let’s focus on what this investment round means for you — and why it’s happening now.

Why now? We’re at an inflection point for enterprise IT

Investors don’t put millions of dollars into businesses that have a small or slow-growing market. 

Every signal, every scrap of intelligence they’re seeing tells them that not only is there a real need for what we at Spectro Cloud do right now, but that it’s going to grow — and fast. 

In fact, we believe (and our research backs this up) that we’re at an inflection point, a convergence of disruptive trends.

In broad terms, the enterprise IT industry is evolving from legacy, VM-based applications to containerization, driving faster innovation in the cloud native ecosystem, with Kubernetes at its heart. 

AI is accelerating the adoption of edge computing in every sector, alongside growing use of multicloud and both virtualized and bare metal data centers to run ever-expanding workloads. 

The result is massive scale and massive complexity. And in-house IT teams, both in the private and public sector, lack the specialist skills to tackle it themselves.

Legacy management tools emerged during the early years of Kubernetes, but it’s become obvious that they’re ill-equipped to meet today’s enterprise needs. 

Because they originated from specific environments and K8s distribution support, they’re highly opinionated and limit choice. 

Because they emerged in a time when most companies had just one DIY Kubernetes cluster, they simply weren’t architected to scale beyond a few dozen clusters, or to provide the degree of automated fleet management that operations teams need to be efficient. 

Put it another way: Kubernetes users need a modern management platform.

In search of a modern solution

You might say that an investment from a top-tier firm like Goldman Sachs is a bet that Spectro is that modern management platform that enterprises need. 

But it’s more than just a bet.

If you haven’t been through an investment round of this size at this stage, let me draw back the curtain for a moment: a prospective investor doesn’t just get hooked by a big idea, and trust what you put in your PowerPoint slides and on your website. Investors are looking for solid traction and evidence that the business is ready to scale, with big upside potential.

They do rigorous due diligence, putting every part of your business under a microscope, looking for challenges and comparing you to your competitors. 

Over an intensive period of weeks, they interview dozens of existing and prospective customers and partners. They check financials and operations. They audit your security and compliance practices. They assess the effectiveness of business functions from customer success to engineering. 

Most of all they check that your product is truly differentiated: that it has a meaningful, lasting advantage over competitors, today and tomorrow.

So when our investors audited us, what did they find?

Differentiated across the board

Spoiler alert: they found that our Palette platform provides a mature and innovative solution to several of the key challenges IT organizations face today, all from a single software platform:

Multi-cluster management at scale

Palette solves the challenge of managing multiple K8s clusters in diverse environments. The magic ingredients: 

• Declarative orchestration across the complete application stack 
• Complete stack freedom across distributions and cloud native integrations.
• Automated lifecycle management tooling
• A patented distributed architecture that can support tens of thousands of Kubernetes clusters without the central management plane becoming a bottleneck

AI in the data center and the distributed edge

Palette significantly simplifies bare metal and edge management, helping organizations realize the potential of AI; for AI training in the data center and AI inference at the edge. Palette’s EdgeAI feature offers integrated LocalAI inference engine and access to AI model marketplaces, simplifying deployment and version control.

Virtualization alternatives and app modernization

Palette’s Virtual Machine Orchestrator (VMO) feature offers a seamless transition to managing both containers and VMs from a single platform at scale, helping teams to modernize their VM workloads with shared resources, operations and security using common tools from the cloud-native ecosystem.

Kubernetes and cloud native in the public sector

Palette VerteX, Spectro Cloud’s ultra-secure, FIPS-compliant edition, is purposely built for public sector organizations and highly-regulated industries, offering end-to-end encryption. It’s supported by Spectro Cloud Government: a dedicated team of specialists that includes continental US technical support, with a growing ecosystem of channel partners.

So what next? 

With the paperwork signed and the press release issued, we’re straight back to work — this is no time for us to coast. We’re still guided by the same mission, with the same passion. Naturally we’re excited about the next chapter of our business following this funding, it’s all about scaling the business. You’ll see some big announcements from us before the end of the calendar year.

If you’re facing the challenges of managing Kubernetes in the enterprise, come talk to us. Find out why our investors just went all-in on Spectro — and why you should too.