Cloud governance startup Cloudtamer accumulates $9.5M

Cloudtamer.io, a Fulton, Maryland-based startup developing a cloud governance platform, today announced that it raised $9.5 million in series A funding led by Blue Heron Capital and TDF Ventures, with participation from Blu Venture Investors, Early Light Ventures, and Gaingels. CEO Brian Price says that the capital will be used to expand Cloudtamer’s sales, marketing, and engineering operations to fuel growth and bring enhanced management capabilities to market.

With the accelerated adoption of cloud technologies over the past year, the necessity of cloud management solutions has correspondingly grown. Gartner predicts that global spending on public clouds will reach $332.3 billion in 2021, and 57% of companies told CloudCheckr in a recent poll that over half of their infrastructure is in the cloud. But many organizations are experiencing significant deployment challenges, including slow time to value, financial insecurity, and compliance risk within the cloud. A Statista survey identified cybersecurity and a lack of expertise as other major barriers to adoption.

Founded in 2018, Cloudtamer offers a collection of governance services that are deployed directly within Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts. Customers host the entire platform in their clouds, keeping credentials and data private. For example, in AWS, Cloudtamer sends reports from an AWS management account to a Simple Storage Service (S3) billing bucket, which it can access via an identity and access management service role.

“Cloudtamer was founded as a spinout from Stratus Solutions. I initially began my career working for a number of defense contracting organizations, and I first became exposed to the cloud at Booz Allen Hamilton, while the cloud was still in its infancy,” Price told VentureBeat via email. “I left Booz Allen Hamilton and began working at Stratus, where it became clear that cloud management and governance was a huge barrier to successful cloud operations for organizations. In 2018, my cofounder Joseph Spurrier and I founded Cloudtamer and started with eight employees. Today, Cloudtamer combines cloud governance and cloud management to ensure that users get the full value of the cloud.”

Cloud governance

Security and compliance are often cited as the top challenges facing enterprises when moving legacy systems to the cloud. In a 2021 Lemongrass poll, executives reported that cloud migrations can cost between $100,000 and $250,000 and rarely come in under budget, with nearly half of migrations taking seven months or more to complete.

Cloudtamer aims to address this challenge by calculating costs in “near-real time” as opposed to every 24 hours, like some cloud providers. Actions taken in Cloudtamer trigger a request to the appropriate service and, if applicable, carry out actions in a cloud environment. The platform provides access to cloud consoles within Cloudtamer, allowing users to move between Cloudtamer’s interface and other consoles for flexibility.

“Moving to and managing cloud environments is a step that organizations, in both federal and commercial markets, are focusing on right now, and they need a solution that enables them to make better decisions and achieve granular control,” Price said.

Cloudtamer’s backend database and web frontend app use AWS CloudFormation templates or Azure Resource Manager templates (depending on the cloud provider), allowing for quick setup. Once installed, Cloudtamer runs on a load-balanced series of instances with an AWS Aurora MySQL database or Azure Database for MySQL.

“We have witnessed many organizations struggle with cloud adoption and believe Cloudtamer is best positioned to help them simplify their operations,” Blue Heron Capital cofounder and managing partner Tom Benedetti said in a statement. “Unlike other cloud governance solutions on the market, Cloudtamer.io’s platform brings data that is scattered across cloud providers into one primary location so that organizations have a centralized view into their cloud usage.”

Cloudtamer competes in a multicloud management market that’s predicted to be worth as much as $19.28 billion by 2028. One rival, Cyral, uses stateless interception technology to deliver enterprise data governance across platforms like Amazon S3, Snowflake, Kafka, MongoDB, and Oracle. Another, Stacklet, incorporates hundreds of policies to optimize data governance across different clouds, accounts, and regions.

But 46-employee Cloudtamer has attracted more than 40 high-profile customers to date, including U.S. governmental entities like NASA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health, along with enterprises such as Indeed and Verizon. For NASA, Cloudtamer helped helped the agency’s field centers manage Earth science data from new satellite launches while also assisting with the onboarding of cloud accounts with different budgets and spend plans, security policies, and user access boundaries.

Cloudtamer’s revenue has grown by double digits every year since 2018, according to Price.

“Digital transformation initiatives have rapidly accelerated over the last two years. I cannot say whether this is because of the pandemic. However, it has spurred the cloud management and governance market, opening many doors for us in the federal space — as well as the enterprise space,” Price said. “We see a lot of need in the healthcare industry, and it’s one of the reasons we chose to partner with Blue Heron Capital as an investor. Their expertise in healthcare and software-as-a-service will help us target this market and deliver solutions to support their critical infrastructure.”