CloudQuery CEO and co-founder Yevgeny Pats helped launch the startup because he needed a tool to give him visibility into his cloud infrastructure resources, and he couldn’t find one on the open market. He built his own SQL-based tool to help 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 one that larger organizations were facing too. Pats says that today they have 20 companies with at least a 1000 employees using the product. Investors took note, rewarding the startup with a $15 million Series A.
Pats believes that cloud infrastructure is locked in the past from a data standpoint, and he wanted to push it into the modern age with CloudQuery. “The cloud infrastructure world is kind of like 2011 from a data engineering perspective and best practices. So we are bringing this to cloud security, compliance and cost tracking, and using all of the data engineering best practices to build on top of those use cases,” Pats told me.
As the product has gained traction, the company has been working hard to give visibility into all of the services from each of the Big Three cloud infrastructure vendors – Amazon, Microsoft and Google. It’s no easy task as he says that AWS alone has around 350 services the product has to tap into.
In addition, they are layering on access to different adjacent SaaS tools like Datadog for monitoring and Okta for single sign-on, and taking advantage of the data from these tools, users can set up compliance or security rules based on certain conditions. He sees customers using the product to figure out things like if they are over provisioning cloud infrastructure resources, to find “zombie” resources that aren’t attached to a project, but companies are still paying for, and to help set up security and compliance rules based on CloudQuery data.
As an open platform, the company or external developers can layer on new features as they see fit and they become 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 soon realize is that no vendor can really support all those API’s. Each vendor is missing some API that they need, some data that they need. So the only way to get there is really to have the open source way where they can contribute back to our official integrations by writing their own integration,” Pats explained.
The company has 15 employees with plans to stay lean for at least the next year, perhaps adding a couple of engineers, as they build community around the product. Pats envisions a SaaS version of the product at some point, but the funding gives him at least three years of runway, so plenty of time to get to 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.