A New Era in Autonomous Cloud Management Begins with Zesty’s $35 Million Series A

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Today is a monumental day in Zesty’s story. We’re thrilled to share that we’ve raised $35 million series A led by Next47 with participation from Sapphire Ventures, Samsung Next, and our returning investor, S-Capital.

In just three years of existence, we’ve raised $42 million in total–validating the need for our AI-driven cloud management technology and its potential to help millions of organizations across the globe overcome their struggles with optimal cloud utilization.

With this new step, we embark on a new opportunity to radically change the face of cloud management by bringing our automation to more businesses than ever before. As a part of this mission, we plan to further develop and expand our product, ensuring the burden of cloud management never falls on the backs of DevOps engineers again.

It’s hard to believe how far we’ve come since our humble beginnings in 2019, but I couldn’t be more proud to be a part of the Zesty journey so far, and I am looking forward to the exciting new chapter that lies ahead.

Zesty’s Bright Beginnings

The idea for Zesty was born out of everyday experiences and real-life frustrations with handling the complexities of cloud management. As a VP of customer success, my clients were repeatedly plagued with high cloud bills which were difficult to control due to the dynamic nature of their cloud environments. At the same time, my co-founder, Alexey Baikov, was a cloud engineer responsible for ensuring the stability and performance of cloud applications. As a part of his job, he was required to make constant manual adjustments, predict capacity needs far in advance, and wake up in the middle of the night to accommodate peaks in scale.

We realized we were experiencing the same problem, but from a different angle. On one hand, talented DevOps engineers were spending too much of their time babysitting the cloud, and on the other hand, businesses were not able to leverage the full flexibility of the cloud as they scaled. Running the cloud efficiently was a humanly impossible task, and as a result, businesses were significantly overspending in order to ensure the stability and performance of their applications.

After several conversations about this issue, Alexey and I came to the same conclusion. We believe engineers should never be forced to choose between stability, performance, and cost efficiency. So we set out to create a product that would enable businesses to leverage the full flexibility, scalability, and efficiency of the cloud with zero human input. We knew our secret ingredient would be AI automation due to its tremendous potential to consume large amounts of data to make critical decisions quickly and seamlessly without any human error.

Our dream turned into reality with the launch of our first product, Commitment Manager, an AI-driven RI automation technology which automatically buys and sells EC2 Reserved Instances according to real-time application needs. After gaining more and more momentum, we were excited to see how well our product actually worked! We were able to save our clients over 50% on EC2 without any effort on their end.

Despite the success of Commitment Manager, we weren’t done yet. In May of 2021, we launched Zesty Disk, the world’s first cloud storage autoscaler that autonomously shrinks and expands storage volumes according to current demand. After only a few months, we’re seeing unbelievable success with Zesty Disk as more and more of our customers are able to save 70% on EBS without making any manual adjustments, while improving their application’s performance

We’re Just Getting Started

The need for our technology is clear. In 2021, our revenue increased by 600%, we tripled our headcount, and moved into our new office.

Today, as our core mission of alleviating cloud management burdens from DevOps teams becomes more critical, our series A marks an important step in this journey. Now, we are able to invest more into research and development to enhance our existing products and build new products that leverage AI for a more efficient, cost-effective, and seamless cloud experience.

We will be able to bring this essential technology to more businesses across the globe, enabling them to scale effortlessly, without any financial or operational strain stemming from the cloud.

Finally, we are able to hire the best people to make this mission a reality as we continue to build a culture of top-notch people who bring fun, innovation, and creativity to our growing team.

I would like to thank our investors Next47, Sapphire Ventures, Samsung Next, and S-Capital for believing in our dream and making it a reality. We couldn’t have done it without your partnership and I am looking forward to working with you to bring our joint goals to fruition. I would also like to thank our customers–you hold us to the highest standards and help us become our best.

Last but definitely not least, I’d like to thank our Zesters. Each and every one of our employees is brilliant, hardworking, humble, and an absolute pleasure to work with. Bringing together a group of people who can act as a team, but bring their own energy and talents to an organization is not always a given, but I feel as though I have won the lottery with our amazing employees. Thank you for your hard work and tremendous contributions. It is an absolute privilege to work with you all!

I can’t wait to see what the future holds for Zesty as we continue to grow, expand, and build more valuable technology.

The cloud revolution is just getting started!

Looking to leverage AI for cost efficient cloud management? You’ve come to the right place! Chat with one of our experts to learn more about Zesty’s intelligent cloud automation technology.