Stackdriver, a Boston-based startup that wants to help companies run and manage their applications on and across public cloud infrastructure, has scored $ 5 million in Series A funding from Bain Capital Ventures.
The company, which has thus far operated in stealth out of a conference room at Northeastern University, has also garnered some pretty impressive talent: Dale Christian, CIO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is on the advisory board. Ben Holtzman, a Bain partner, and Ben Nye, a managing director joined the board of directors.
“Our mission is pretty bold: to be the platform and brain at the center that delivers on the promise of utility computing,” Stackfinder co-founder Dan Belcher told me in an interview. “This means we will integrate with other systems — Amazon Web Services, CloudWatch etc., and drive automation working with companies like Opscode,” he said.
“The whole idea of utility computing should be that you as a cusomer –everyone we talked to said even if we’re not running across multiple clouds that’s only because the tools weren’t here,” he said.
Belcher and co-founder Izzy Azeri are VMware veterans. Belcher also did stints at Microsoft and Sonian and Azeri at EMC and Acronis.
Jeremy Katz, a DevOps expert who has been with Hubspot, is also aboard.
The funding will be used to hire engineers and build out the product, Belcher said.
This is indeed an ambitious project for a four-person start-up. Legacy systems management companies like CA and BMC are attacking the same problem while newer DevOps tools purveyors are also coming up the stack to offer more cloud management capabilities.
