Spotinst secures $2M Series A for cloud optimization

Israeli startup helps clients save money on tasks requiring cloud infrastructure by Amazon, Google

Cloud optimization company Spotinst today announced that it has secured a $2 million Series A round of funding led by PICO Venture Partners. The new funding is Spotinst’s first venture capital raise.

Headquartered in Tel Aviv and launched last year in collaboration with New York-based Precision Capital, Spotinst offers a core product called Elastigroup, which is deployed across multiple data centers in order to provide 100 percent availability for processes running in the cloud.

So while Amazon EC2 Spot Instances and Google Preemptible Virtual Machines (VMs) are designed for tasks that require heavy data crunching in the cloud but only on periodic or short-term bases, Spotinst builds upon those solutions to offer its customers a more reliable cluster. To do so, the company uses a price prediction algorithm, monitors cloud metrics and trends, and employs other advanced tools.

Though it derives its name from Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, Spotinst also supports Google Preemptible VMs. Support for Microsoft Azure is coming later this year.

Additionally, Spotinst offers another product called Elastitude, a resource optimizer and anomaly detector for large data profles in the cloud. The service analyzes CPU, Network Out, Network In, and other parameters to derive actionable insights around cloud infrastructure.

Today, Spotinst counts Inneractive, Spot.IM, Wiser, ironSource, and GameGenetics among its current clients.

“Leveraging the benefits of the Spot markets and running cost-aware applications can be a complicated, costly and frustrating process, even for mature companies with experienced DevOps teams and extensive cloud experience,” said Amiram Shachar, CEO of Spotinst, in a prepared statement. “Spotinst allows any company to outsource the management of the Spot Instance market, enabling them to focus on the core elements of their business.”

The basic version of Spotinst, which offers one Elastigroup and support for up to five instances, is free to use. The professional version, which offers up to 50 Elastigroups and support for up to 500 instances, costs 15 to 25 percent of the customer's monthly savings. That’s a unique pricing model predicated on the company’s confidence that its solution will generate 50-80 percent in savings for the customer.

In other words, while most companies claim to save the customer money, Spotinst actually puts its money where its mouth is.

For enterprise customers, those who need access to unlimited Elastigroups and support for an unlimited number of instances, you need to get in touch with the company to see pricing.

Spotinst does have competitors in this space, though one of them (ClusterK) was acquired by Amazon last year for somewhere between $20-$50 million. Batchly is another company offering a similar service, though it’s unclear how much traction they’ve made.