Silicon Valley startup YotaScale announces industry-first autonomous cloud operations platform; raises $8 million in Series A funding

YotaScale, a Silicon Valley-based infrastructure performance management platform for cloud computing startup, announced the general availability of its customer-proven, AI-powered cloud operations platform. In addition, the company also announced an $8 million Series A financing round to help enterprises optimize cloud workloads for cost, performance and availability. The latest round brings the company’s funding total to $11.6 million.  This round was led by Crosslink Capital (Matt Bigge), with participation from existing investors – Pelion Venture Partners (Chad Packard) and Engineering Capital (Ashmeet Sidana). YotaScale also secured a $3.6 million venture round in 2017 from Engineering Capital, Pelion Ventures and angels Jocelyn Goldfein, Timothy Chou and Robert Dykes.

Founded in 2015 by Asim Razzaq, Abbas Yousafzai, Imran Moin, and Michael Babiak, YotaScale is an infrastructure performance management platform for cloud computing. It is funded by Engineering Capital and Pelion Ventures. The idea arose from CEO Asim Razzaq’s experience building and managing large scale infrastructure at companies like eBay and PayPal where Razzaq was Senior Engineering Director. The YotaScale platform has already been selected and deployed by several enterprise customers, including AdRoll, Highfive, HomeAway, ProtectWise and Reltio.

YotaScale’s tool collects and analyzes billions of data points using ML algorithms to balance performance, availability and cost. Enterprises can align their cloud environment with their strategic priorities enabling them to shift valuable technical resources to creating and launching revenue producing applications while reducing operating costs. The design goal is to create the equivalent of a self driving car, a system that handles routine tasks autonomously and can be adjusted for different operating characteristics depending on business priorities. YotaScale delivers Autonomous Cloud Operations with a platform that provides intelligent, actionable insights to cloud operations, allowing teams to take ever-changing application needs into account and optimize the infrastructure to meet business needs.

“Today’s enterprises are struggling as cloud operations get more complex by the day,” said Asim Razzaq, CEO and co-founder of YotaScale. “The average enterprise has more than 25 tools for managing cost, performance and availability for cloud workloads. Plus, companies spend 30 percent of their cloud operations time on manual tasks that should be automated. Our objective with Autonomous Cloud Operations is to bring intelligence to cloud operations, giving enterprises increased visibility and actionable insights that minimize time-to-resolution and save cost.”

The YotaScale platform makes Autonomous Cloud Operations and self-managing cloud infrastructure a reality, boosting enterprise cloud computing efficiency in the process. YotaScale automates performance management, allowing enterprises to optimize their cloud infrastructure to gain the most value from their public cloud investment. YotaScale’s AI-powered capabilities, such as anomaly detection, continuous optimization, contextual analytics and predictive capacity planning, allow enterprise customers to optimize cloud workloads for cost, performance and availability.

“Continuously optimizing the cost, availability and performance of an application environment is the Holy Grail in DevOps and enterprise IT,” said Torsten Volk, industry analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. “YotaScale provides exactly this continuous optimization based on its AI model, trained on 500 PB of cross-enterprise cloud operations data, and its constant ingestion of live data from cloud provider APIs, along with third-party configuration and performance management solutions.”

Several leading enterprise customers, including AdRoll, Highfive, HomeAway, ProtectWise and Reltio, have deployed YotaScale in production to manage their public cloud. Unlike cost reporting and other legacy tools, the YotaScale platform applies AI and machine learning for next-generation, real-time cloud infrastructure optimization. The platform guides customers through various stages of cloud maturity, ensuring that every cloud deployment adheres to a company’s cloud operations policies, thereby helping achieve and maintain governance with those policies. The YotaScale platform detects anomalous trends, diagnoses the root cause, suggests fixes and can even make predictions about future usage patterns.

“Unlike other tools in the market, YotaScale demonstrated that its AI models can provide proactive cost control by catching unusual spikes in real time,” said Valentino Volonghi, CTO at AdRoll. “Its anomaly detection capabilities catch runaway cloud spend immediately, alert appropriate teams and provide deep root-cause analysis so that problems can be remediated quickly.”

The YotaScale platform uses models that have been tuned using cloud data from hundreds of enterprises. YotaScale’s “secret sauce” is a multi-step, machine learning pipeline tuned over three years on 500+ PB of data across hundreds of enterprises. The YotaScale platform also streamlines cloud operations; workflows are integrated with existing Cloud Ops tools including Slack, JIRA, PagerDuty and more.

“Limited visibility into cost and performance can cost companies millions of dollars and waste thousands of hours,” said Matt Bigge, partner at Crosslink Capital and new YotaScale board member. “YotaScale is addressing this cloud infrastructure pain point with Autonomous Cloud Operations, which provides needed insight into cloud computing environments. The company has deep infrastructure knowledge in enterprise infrastructure, cloud computing and machine learning and is well-positioned to lead the future of cloud operations.”