London-based startup Cloud 66, which allows developers to deploy and start managing Ruby on Rails apps on any major cloud environment within minutes, is coming out of the woodwork today with the announcement of a $500,000 seed round.
The new cash comes from a number of angel investors in the UK and the US. The startup's AngelList profile shows backers include Kima Ventures, investment vehicle Firestartr, Techstars Managing Director Jason Seats, Wellington Partners' Christian Thaler-Wolski, Huddle co-founder Andy McLoughlin and former Google M&A exec Anil Hansjee.
The freshly injected capital will be used to fuel expansion to new markets.
Founded in August 2012 by Khash Sajadi and Vic van Gool, Cloud 66 offers a platform that enables developers to deploy, manage and scale their applications on their own private servers or on multiple cloud platforms (basically all major providers, including AWS, Joyent, Rackspace and DigitalOcean).
Additionally, the startup aims to help more customers (from developers to digital agencies) build and manage their infrastructure in the cloud, sans lock-in disadvantages.
The Cloud 66 platform works like this, in a nutshell: it reads and analyzes code to come up with the best setup for servers based on real requirements, and scales along with an application's needs.
Users don't have to download or install anything, and the tool can be used to deploy an app in the cloud or private servers, while Cloud 66 automatically configures optimal security settings (which can of course be tweaked later on).
Pricing is $9 per server per month (although we should note development stacks are free, and the very first production server is a bit pricier at $19 per month).
Today, Cloud 66 has hundreds of customers in more than 100 countries, having clocked some 3.4 million deployments to date. With the fresh funding, the goal is to scale the business internationally.
Cloud 66 was incubated at Telefonica's Wayra, and became one of the first partners of the Telefonica Cloud (although, again, its real strength is in multi-cloud support).
The founding pair has a ton of combined experience in software development and management of large and scalable systems in a variety of industries (both founders worked at Lehman Brothers).
Heroku is an obvious competitor, but there's a notable difference in the way Cloud 66 works (particularly when developers want to seize more control over servers, their cloud instances and whatnot), and it could cut costs. There's also the likes of Puppet Labs, Chef and SaltStack.
Cloud 66 customers include Adobe, The Summit, O2 and BBC. One to keep an eye on.
Featured image credit: Space Chimp / Shutterstock
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