Spending on the cloud shows no signs of slowing down. In the first quarter of 2021, investment in corporate cloud services infrastructure grew to $41.8 billion, representing 35% year-over-year growth, according to Grand View Research. But while both small and medium businesses and enterprises admit to spending more on the cloud, they are also struggling to control their spending. In the year According to a 2020 Statista study, companies estimate that 30 percent of their cloud spending will ultimately be wasted.
The desire to better control cloud costs has created a cottage industry of vendors selling services that buy into companies’ infrastructure costs. The category grows over time, but one of the most successful vendors to date is Zesty, which automatically scales to meet application needs in real-time.
Zesti today closed a $75 million Series B round led by B Capital and Sapphire Ventures with participation from Next47 and S Capital. Bringing the company’s total revenue to $116 million, the proceeds will be used to support product development and expand Zesty’s workforce from 120 employees to 160 by the end of the year, CEO Maxim Melamedov told TechCrush.
“DevOps engineers … face limitations such as reduced program commitments and preset amounts of storage, CPU, and RAM, all of which cannot be continuously adjusted to meet demand,” Melamedov said in an email interview. “This wastes countless engineering hours and billions of dollars each year trying to predict and manually adjust cloud infrastructure.”
Melamedov founded Zesty in 2019 with Alessi Bykov. After the pair noticed that cloud infrastructure was not keeping pace with the pace of change in business environments. Prior to co-founding Zesty, Melamedov was VP of Customer Success at Gimnix, a travel technology company. He worked with Bykov for a short time at the big data company Feedvisor. Bykov was previously head of the DevOps team at NetVertis.
Image Credits: Zesty
At the heart of Zesti is an AI model trained on real-world and “synthetic” cloud resource usage data to estimate how much an application needs at any given time (eg CPU cores, hard drives, etc.). The platform takes actions dictated by the model’s predictions, such as automatically shrinking, scaling up and scaling storage size types, and buying and selling public cloud instances.
To increase or decrease storage, Zesty converts file system volumes in the cloud into a virtual disk that consists of a series of multiple volumes, each of which can be expanded or shrunk. On the compute side, the platform collects real-time performance metrics by buying or selling cloud computing in response to application usage.
“The primary tools we use to design efficient automation of cloud resources come from the fields of decision analysis and asset management. Most of the classical techniques used to solve such problems are slow and may not be suitable for real-time decisions, which are critical for quick response to change,” said Melamedov. With Zesti, organizations can significantly reduce cloud costs and ease the burden of managing cloud resources in an ever-changing business environment. Because in an ever-changing world, Zesty allows its infrastructure to change around it.
Those are lofty hopes to be sure. But Zesti has grown its customer base to more than 300 companies, including startups Heap, Armis and WalkMe, suggesting it’s on to something.
[T]It creates an epidemic[d] “We are fortunate to see a new level of demand for our solutions and a significant growth in demand for our products,” said Melamedov. “Companies were not only trying to save money, but they were [also] He was forced to cut employees. Freeing up DevOps and other operations staff has become imperative and that’s where we come in – freeing them to maintain the cloud and be constantly on call to adjust cloud resources as needs change. Current [economic] The slowdown has only helped demonstrate our value even more, as we now have dozens of case studies to share that show a quick and easy return on investment.
The Zesty Challenge continues to stand out in a field of competitors. Microsoft in 2010 In 2017, it acquired Cloudyn, which provides tools for analyzing and forecasting cloud spending. Then, in 2019, Apptio acquired cloud expense management provider Cloudability Click, VMware, NetApp and Intel CloudHealth, Spot (formerly Spotinst) and Granulet respectively within a few years. Elsewhere, ventures such as Granulet, Cast AI, Exotanium and Sync Computing have raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital for cloud cost-optimization technology.
Melamedov would not elaborate on Zesti’s financial affairs. But he expressed confidence in the company’s prospects, noting that Zesti has reached an annual run rate of “tens of millions”.
