Volterra is fresh out of stealth today with a huge fundraising announcement to boot. The company, named after an Italian town in Tuscany, helps applications scale across multiple clouds. In simple terms, the company helps other companies run their software on more than one software hosting service.

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In the era of global public clouds (Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon’s AWS, etc) and private clouds, getting an application to work well everywhere isn’t easy. Volterra’s three products focus on deploying and managing apps across clouds by leveraging Kubernetes (VoltStack), data transference and security (VoltMesh), and managing multi-cloud deployments (Volterra Console).

If you got that, great, this is for you. If not, you probably care more about who put the aggregate $50 million into the business. Let’s get to that.

Money, Sources

The company’s $50 million raise is what it calls “funding to date,” meaning that it’s the result of more than one round. Volterra may be new to us, but it’s not as young a startup as you might think. (The company claims over 30 customers and more than 100 engineers in its release, so it’s also not that old, either.) It was founded in 2017, according to its Crunchbase profile.

We hopped on the phone with CEO and founder Ankur Singla who told us the company had actually raised (in stealth mode) a $20 million Series A in November 2017. More investors continued to show interest, he said, and although Volterra didn’t formally announce a Series B raise, it raised an additional $30 million-plus over the past two years.

Putting up the money are some familiar faces (Khosla, Mayfield), and some notable corporate investors (M12 from Microsoft, Samsung NEXT from Samsung, ITOCHU Technology Ventures from ITOCHU).1

The venture interest is understandable; the cloud is only becoming more important to the world of technology; no young company wants to build their own infra-footprint, and with the cost of a real global server footprint at scale running in the dozens of billions of dollars, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba are becoming de facto pillars of your next tech project.

So, you probably want to use more than one for the sake of redundancy and geographic focus. And if you are, you’ll probably want to have some sort of software to help with that. And, so far as we can tell this morning, that’s where Volterra comes in.

Singla said the company’s customers are a mix of large enterprises and smaller-to-medium-sized business with revenue in the $100 million to $300 million range. Volterra currently works with Amazon, Google and Microsoft clouds and will be adding some “from China” over the next 12 months, Singla said. It operates under a usage model with an hourly rate as low as less than $1 and hour for certain features.

The company plans to use its new capital primarily on product development and expand its go-to-market team, according to Singla.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias