CloudQuery CEO and co-founder Yevgeny Pats helped launch the startup because he needed a tool to give him insight into his cloud infrastructure resources, and he couldn’t find one on the open market. He built his own SQL-based tool to understand exactly what resources he was using, based on data engineering best practices.
After he released the open source solution, he saw that the problem he encountered was also one that larger organizations were facing. Pats says today they have 20 companies with at least 1,000 employees using the product. Investors took note and awarded the startup a $15 million Series A.
Pats believes that cloud infrastructure is locked in the past from a data point of view, and he wanted to push it into the modern age with CloudQuery. “The cloud infrastructure world is a bit like 2011 from a data engineering perspective and best practices. So we’re bringing this to cloud security, compliance, and cost tracking, using all of the data engineering best practices to build on top of those use cases,” Pats told me.
As the product has grown in popularity, the company has worked hard to provide insight into all services from each of the Big Three cloud infrastructure providers – Amazon, Microsoft and Google. It’s not an easy task, as he says that AWS alone has about 350 services that the product should use.
In addition, they provide access to several adjacent SaaS tools such as Datadog for monitoring and Okta for single sign-on. Using the data from these tools, users can set compliance or security rules under certain conditions. He sees customers using the product to figure out things like whether they’re over-provisioning cloud infrastructure resources, to find “zombie” resources that aren’t associated with a project but that companies are still paying for, and to help with setting up security and compliance. rules based on CloudQuery data.
Since it is an open platform, the company or third-party developers can add new features as they see fit and make them available to everyone. While there are some commercial companies working on some aspects of the visibility problem, Pats says that as an open source product, CloudQuery is in a unique position to address it.
“What users quickly realize is that no single vendor can really support all of those APIs. Every vendor is missing an API they need, some data they need. So the only way to get there is to have the open source way that they can contribute to our official integrations by writing their own integration,” explains Pats.
The company has 15 employees with plans to stay lean over the next year, perhaps with a few engineers, as they build a community around the product. At one point, Pats has envisioned a SaaS version of the product, but the funding will give him at least a three-year runway, so plenty of time to start generating revenue.
Tiger Global led the company’s $15 million Series A with participation from existing investors Boldstart, Haystack, Mango and Work-Bench. The company raised a $3.5 million seed last year for a total of $18.5 million raised to date.
