Spectro Cloud: Dominating Kubernetes from Edge to Cloud
Sierra’s Partnership on their Journey from Seed to $75M Series C
A couple of decades in venture capital taught me that if you can’t beat them, fund them! I met Tenry Fu, the founder of Spectro Cloud, in 2019 when he had just left Cisco. He had successfully sold them his previous company, CliQr, which had crushed one of my portfolio companies in the container management space. But Tenry had unfinished business in the space and believed the time was right to create a generational company given the evolution of the sector.
The founders Tenry, Saad, and Gautam had a vision to make Kubernetes (K8s) easy to manage and consume as the engine of innovation for enterprises. They wanted to enable organizations to modernize, deploy, and support applications anywhere. Back in 2019, it was just the three public clouds but we felt that the tremendous market potential and the team’s deep domain expertise made it a compelling early investment.
Sierra Ventures led Spectro’s $6M seed round with participation from Ed Sim at Boldstart and Gaurav Manglik (Tenry’s CliQr co-founder) at WestWave. The first couple of years were heads-down, building the best enterprise-grade platform with a few design partners. As the company began to scale commercial operations, we added Stripes and Qualcomm Ventures to our investor list, and Paul Melchiorre (Ariba and Anaplan Sales) joined the board.
Over the past couple of years, Spectro is seeing strong tailwinds.
- K8s is now mature and multi-cluster management at scale is a massive problem
- AI is driving the adoption of bare metal K8s in the data center and at the edge
- VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom is causing enterprises to look for alternatives
- The public sector is rapidly adopting K8s (even faster than commercial)
These factors have led to strong revenue traction and Spectro’s dominant position in this huge market. We’re excited that Mike Reilly from Goldman shares Tenry’s vision for building a foundational infrastructure company and led a $75M Series C round. There’s a lot more building to be done here, but we have the team and platform to do just that. I am Thankful that I have been part of this exciting journey.