Cloud governance platform Stacklet secures $18 million in Series A funding

Stacklet, a startup commercializing the open source cloud governance project Cloud Custodian, today announced that it has raised a Series A funding round of $18 million. The round was led with participation from Foundation Capital and new individual investor Liam Randall, who serves as vice president of Business Development is joining the company. Addition and Foundation Capital also invested in Stacklet's seed round, which the company announced last August. This new round brings the company's total funding to $22 million.

Stacklet helps organizations manage their data governance posture across multiple clouds, accounts, policies and geographies, with a focus on security, cost optimization and regulatory compliance. The service provides its users with a set of predefined policy packages that codify best practices for accessing cloud resources, although users can of course specify their own rules. In addition, Stacklet provides a range of resource auditing and policy health analysis capabilities, as well as real-time inventory and change management logs for an organization's cloud assets.

The company was co-founded by Travis Stanfield (CEO) and Kapil Thangavelu (CTO). Both bring a lot of experience in the industry. Stanfield was an engineer at Microsoft and led DealerTrack Technologies, while Thangavelu worked at Canonical and more recently on Amazon's AWSOpen team. Thangavelu is also one of the co-developers of the Cloud Custodian project, which was first incubated in Capital One where the two co-founders met during their time there, and is now a Sandbox project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation umbrella.

"When I joined Capital One, they had made the executive decision to go to the cloud and close their data centers," Thangavelu said. "I joined that movement on the first floor and Custodian was born as a side project. I was looking at some governance and security requirements that large regulated companies have when they move to the cloud."

The Pandemic and the Challenges It Posed

As companies have moved more quickly to the cloud during the pandemic, the need for products like Stacklets has also increased. The company does not name most of its customers, but did tell FICO about a design partner. Stacklet, however, is not focused exclusively on the Shop. "Once the cloud infrastructure for a particular enterprise is large enough that a single person can't know it, we can deploy it at that time and certainly either through open source or through open value Stacklet, we'll have a history there. However, the open source Cloud Custodian project is already being used in earnest by large enterprises, and of course Stacklet benefits from that.