Reflections on Our Journey With Spot

We are excited to announce that portfolio company Spot has been acquired by NetApp.

Firstly, congratulations to Amiram and the entire team at Spot. From the moment we met 3 years ago for a late night drink at AWS Reinvent, it was clear that Amiram was building something special. A great vision usually isn’t enough though. Their tireless drive, work ethic, and technical prowess allowed them to move fast and ultimately achieve this great outcome.

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Before that late night drink, we had been spending a lot of time thinking about and researching the future of cloud computing + AI, and what the shift to the public cloud would mean for organizations. Already, AWS had become the fastest growing ‘startup’ of the last decade, reaching a $40Bn run rate in 14 years.

We believed that as more workloads moved from on-premises to the cloud, a “cloud operating system” would be required to run applications in the cloud efficiently. This platform would use advanced analytics and machine learning to:

1) Forecast expected cloud costs based on usage, trends, availability and planned migrations.

2) Dynamically reduce cost and complexity of cloud infrastructure by optimizing compute for lowest cost and highest performance across clouds and compute type, delivering 80%+ cost reductions.

3) End to End visibility for devops and finance teams to gain insights on cloud usage and application behaviour patterns.

4) Autoscaling of applications in the cloud to reduce time and effort for devops teams, already in short supply and in high demand.

When we met Spot, they were building many elements of this cloud operating system.

There were many companies trying to address the ballooning cloud cost and complexity problem using a reactive approach, whereby they would analyze the cloud bill and then make configuration recommendations to decrease cloud costs. These products were sold to finance and saw little adoption in engineering, as they were reporting based, not action-oriented.  Our view was that to actually achieve sustainable cost and complexity reduction, an AI-driven, automated approach would both be required and embraced by the key stakeholders, the software engineers.

Spot was the only company that was building this comprehensive, cloud agnostic platform.

Amiram was looking to expand his investor syndicate with an entrepreneur-focused fund that could help him accelerate the design and build out of his GTM machine. He was looking for a partner to help him anticipate and break through key inflection points on the journey to $100M+ in ARR. We thoroughly enjoyed working with him and marvel at the organization he built and growth he achieved in such a short time frame.

While this may be the end of our journey with Spot, we continue to believe in our thesis and remain eager to fund companies in the space. 

We are grateful to Amiram for including us on this journey and look forward to continuing to build our friendship as he transitions to the next leg of his story.

See below for more coverage of the story:

Calcalist

NetApp

Spot + NetApp