Spectro Cloud Announces Qualcomm Ventures Investment to Accelerate Edge and AI Innovation at Scale

San Jose, Calif. — September 14, 2023 — Spectro Cloud, a leading platform provider of  modern Kubernetes management, today announced an investment led by Qualcomm Ventures. Spectro Cloud is a leader in helping organizations realize the true potential of Kubernetes and its related ecosystem across any datacenter, cloud, or edge environment, at scale. 

This new investment will help Spectro Cloud further extend its industry leadership in the areas of Kubernetes management, edge, and the related use of powerful new technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) across a variety of industries and applications, including automotive, industrial automation, healthcare, retail, energy and telecommunications. 

While organizations realize the transformative potential of the confluence of Kubernetes, edge computing and AI, they are often held back by significant challenges: 

• Lack of on-site technical skills to deploy, activate and maintain complex and highly distributed computing stacks, comprising a combination of specialized hardware and modern applications including AI-augmented workloads. 
• Security concerns due to an expanded attack surface that infrastructure is exposed to at the edge, exacerbated by often sensitive and confidential AI data and models. 
• Variable connectivity that can disrupt normal operations and management, ultimately, compromising workload availability and value to customers, partners, and employees. 
• Unsustainable workload to manage large numbers of highly distributed edge locations across the full lifecycle, including the need to frequently apply changes, patches and  monitor AI stacks.

These challenges make it difficult to effectively combine the ability to both deploy and scale applications at the edge while maintaining flexibility, choice, and cost-efficiency. 

“As the adoption of AI technologies accelerates, the need for more processing to be done on and near the device has become essential,“ said Carlos Kokron, Vice President, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Managing Director, Qualcomm Ventures Americas. “Spectro Cloud’s solution helps solve the unique challenges that come with deploying modern applications at the edge. We are thrilled to invest in Spectro Cloud to enable Edge AI across industries.” 

The Spectro Cloud Palette Edge platform addresses the challenges of running Kubernetes and  AI at the edge, enabling teams to easily deploy and manage the complete lifecycle of full  software stacks, significantly reducing operational effort and cost. It provides:

• A unique decentralized architecture for scale from one to tens of thousands of clusters, for any type of deployment or type of connectivity. 
• Comprehensive management across the full lifecycle with plug-n-play onboarding and full-stack declarative management from the OS to the application, for both bare metal and virtualized appliances. 
• Security from the silicon to the application with tightly integrated capabilities between hardware and software, flexible immutability and end-to-end encryption and zero-trust access.

Also announced today, the new Palette EdgeAI™ solution is built to simplify the deployment and  management of AI-ready edge software stacks, including improving AI engine and model accessibility, simplifying upgrades and rollbacks, and enabling advanced capabilities such as federated training and advanced model observability. 

“We could not be more excited to welcome Qualcomm Ventures to the Spectro Cloud family,” said Tenry Fu, Spectro Cloud CEO and co-founder. “The investment, beyond validating our team’s ability to execute and solve real problems for our customers, reflects the market momentum around edge and AI. Our two companies share a view of what’s needed and possible to help our customers, and that’s really exciting”. 

With headquarters in San Jose, California, and locations in India and Europe, Spectro Cloud will use the new investment funds to further extend its Palette platform to meet the increasing needs of businesses to simplify the delivery of modern cloud native applications at scale across any environment. Spectro Cloud will also grow its commercial and public sector direct and channel partner sales and support.  

Qualcomm Ventures is joined in this round of funding by NEC and Translink Orchestrating  Future Fund, plus existing Spectro Cloud investors. 

About Qualcomm Ventures 

Qualcomm Ventures, acting through Qualcomm Ventures LLC or its affiliated entities, has been making strategic investments in technology companies that have the potential to dramatically transform our world since 2000. As a global investor, we look to help entrepreneurs build revolutionary businesses that reshape the world around us. For more information please visit: www.qualcommventures.com.  

About Spectro Cloud 

Spectro Cloud uniquely enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes in production, at scale. Its Palette enterprise Kubernetes management platform gives platform engineering and DevOps teams effortless control of the full Kubernetes lifecycle even across multiple clouds, data centers, bare metal and edge environments. Ops teams are empowered to support their developers with curated Kubernetes stacks and tools based on their specific needs, with granular governance and enterprise-grade security. Co-founded in 2019 by CEO Tenry Fu, Vice President of Engineering Gautam Joshi and Chief Technology Officer Saad Malik, Spectro  Cloud is backed by Stripes, Sierra Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, NEC and Translink Orchestrating Future Fund, Boldstart Ventures, Westwave Capital, Alter Venture Partners,  Firebolt Ventures, T-Mobile Ventures and TSG. For more information, visit https://www.spectrocloud.com or follow @spectrocloudinc and @spectrocloudgov on Twitter. 

PR contact: Ant Newman - ant@spectrocloud.com