Here Are 10 Cloud Startups To Watch In 2024

Cloud startups offering observability, GenAI assistance and a cloud experience on-premises are among the companies on our list.

A cloud-native observability platform. A cloud platform for building and running generative artificial intelligence. And a commercial cloud computer system.

These are some of the startups that have captured CRN’s attention as we say goodbye to 2023 and look forward to 2024.

Although the cloud remains dominated by a small number of players, with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft considered No. 1 and No. 2 in the space, the need for cloud technology by businesses and organizations means that an upstart still has room to make a name for itself.

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Cloud Startups 2024

In November, Gartner forecast that worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services will total $679 billion in 2024 and hit $1 trillion in 2027.

The companies appearing on this list are:

Read on for more information on these standout startups.

VirtualZ

Minneapolis

Founder, CEO: Jeanne Glass

VirtualZ enters 2024 with a nice war chest—a $2.2 million seed funding round unveiled in December.

The vendor offers technology that moves data between IBM Z mainframe servers and cloud or on-premises applications.

VirtualZ seeks services partners as part of its go-to-market strategy, with partners including Mainline, Infosys, Summit Data Group and Edge Solutions & Consulting.

Glass founded VirtualZ in 2018, according to her LinkedIn account. Before starting VirtualZ, she was vice president of sales for the western region for 1E for about a year. She was also director of sales at Tripwire, leaving the company in 2018 after about five years.

Botco.ai

Scottsdale, Ariz.

Co-Founder, CEO: Rebecca Clyde

Botco.ai offers the GenAI Chat Cloud suite of generative artificial intelligence products that aim to improve sales, marketing and customer relationship initiatives.

The suite leverages proprietary large language models to analyze information from websites, content management systems, CRM software and other data sources to provide fast, accurate answers to user questions in a conversational manner, according to Botco.ai.

The startup launched the suite in June and a month later, Google selected Botco.ai as a recipient of $150,000 as part of the cloud giant’s Latino Founder Fund. The startup received non-dilutive capital, up to $100,000 in Google Cloud credits, hands-on mentorship from Googlers, sales training, investor prep, mental health therapy and community offerings.

Clyde co-founded Botco.ai in 2018, according to her LinkedIn account. She co-founded marketing agency Ideas Collide in 2006 and led the company for more than 10 years as CEO. She still works at the company as a partner and strategic adviser.

Render

San Francisco

Co-Founder, CEO: Anurag Goel

Render offers developers a unified cloud for building and running applications and websites and has more than 750,000 developers and teams using its tools.

Users choose web services, static sites and other service types. They can deploy in seconds and leverage automatic deployments to keep code current. Users can communicate with any protocol without traversing the public internet, defend against denial-of-service attacks, and run in managed environments for Python, Ruby and more, according to Render.

In June, Render announced a $50 million Series B round of funding to continue updating the platform. The startup also made its projects feature generally available to allow for more collaboration on applications.

Since then, Render has launched a new log explorer with text search and label-based filters; automatic HTTP request logs for web services; a new pre-deploy command; and point-in-time recovery for databases.

Planned features from the company include an easy way to use object storage with the capabilities of AWS S3, a way to define isolated networks and assign services to them and a command-line interface, according to Render.

Goel founded Render in 2018, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously founded Crestle in 2016, later selling it to Doc.ai. Goel was also employee No. 8 at Stripe, leaving in 2016 with the title of head of risk.

Chronosphere

New York

Co-Founder, CEO: Martin Mao

Chronosphere says its cloud-native observability platform puts engineering teams back in control by taming rampant data growth and cloud-native complexity.

The company looks to transform customers' cloud observability data based on need, context and utility, enabling clients to store only useful data in order to reduce costs and improve performance. Chronosphere’s fast alerts and issue resolutions ensure reliable and responsive cloud workloads.

This year, the startup raised $115 million during a Series C funding round, bringing total funding to nearly $350 million. Chronosphere also formed a go-to-market partnership with Google Cloud to help joint customers resolve incidents faster and control cloud operability costs.

After the funding round, Chronosphere made its Lens feature available for interacting with metrics, traces and events in a single, automatically generated, service-oriented view. It also joined Amazon Web Services’ Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate program. The vendor has a channel partner program.

Mao co-founded Chronosphere in 2019. He previously worked at Uber for about four years, leaving with the title of engineering manager, according to his LinkedIn account.

Wiz

New York

Co-Founder, CEO: Assaf Rappaport

Wiz helps customers build more quickly in the cloud while also enabling security and developers to work together. The company reached a $10 billion valuation this year after capturing hundreds of millions in capital funding.

Known for its slew of cloud security products, Wiz also provides cloud compliance automation, vulnerability management and an integration platform to enable bi-directional sharing of data analytics. Wiz provides agentless full-stack coverage of AWS and Microsoft Azure workloads in a matter of minutes.

In March, Wiz announced its first formal partner program to help accelerate the company’s sales through the channel.

The company recently extended its support for Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, including support for customers to build, deploy and scale AI models on the cloud infrastructure.

Prior to co-founding Wiz in 2020, Rappaport was general manager of research and development in Israel for Microsoft, according to his LinkedIn account. He worked at Microsoft for about four years.

Ternary

San Francisco

Co-Founder, CEO: Sasha Kipervarg

Ternary promises enterprises and MSPs a multi-cloud spend management platform that unites engineering and financial operations teams on cost efficiencies for AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and other offerings.

In October, Ternary raised $12 million in a Series A financing round and said its customer base had grown fourfold, including among enterprises and MSPs. The vendor said it would use the funds toward product development and interoperability. The company has a partner program.

Jump Capital led the round. Fin Capital, RiverPark Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital and Gaingels participated.

Kipervarg co-founded Ternary in 2020. He previously worked at LiveRamp for about three years as head of global cloud operations, according to his LinkedIn account.

Env0

Sunnyvale, Calif.

Co-Founder, CEO: Ohad Maislish

After HashiCorp switched its longtime open-source Terraform offering to Business Source License in August, Env0 and a group of other companies sprung into action to offer an open- source alternative.

Env0 has covered the cost of five full-time engineers to work on the project for at least five years —as have Harness and Spacelift. More than 150 other companies have contributed other efforts to the project.

Come Jan. 10, Env0 and its partners in the effort will make OpenTofu v1.6.1 generally available as a permanent open-source option for infrastructure-as-code.

As for Env0 itself, its infrastructure-as-code automation and management tools helped the vendor secure a $35 million Series A round of funding in March.

Env0 rolled out new features in June, including bulk operations running, environment role-based access control granularity and the ability to move projects and sub-projects within a hierarchy.

In October, Env0 became SOC 2 Type II compliant, rolled out a teams feature for grouping users for better permissions management, and enhanced the workflows feature to simplify deployment in complex environments with dependencies, according to Env0.

Maislish co-founded Env0 in 2018, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously co-founded and led Arno Software for about a year and co-founded and led Capester for about three years.

MotherDuck

Seattle

Co-Founder, CEO: Jordan Tigani

On June 22, startup MotherDuck launched the first release of its serverless MotherDuck Cloud Analytics Platform that combines cloud and embedded database technology to make it easy to analyze data no matter where it resides.

MotherDuck is based on the company’s DuckDB open-source, embeddable database. The cloud system makes it easy to analyze data of any size by combining the speed of an in-process database with the scalability of the cloud, according to the company.

The company also works with consulting partners, including Xebia and Bytecode IO, according to MotherDuck.

MotherDuck makes the argument that most advances in data analysis in recent years have been geared toward large businesses and organizations with more than a petabyte of data while neglecting small and midsize companies with like-sized data volumes.

In September the company raised $52.5 million in Series B funding, boosting its total financing to $100 million.

Since then, MotherDuck has launched new features including the ability to query Azure object storage, better performance and reliability with lower memory usage and more intelligent parsing of CSV files, according to the company.

Tigani co-founded the startup in 2022. He worked at SingleStore for about two years, leaving with the title of chief product officer, according to his LinkedIn account. He worked at Google for more than 10 years and was a founding engineer of BigQuery.

Together AI

San Francisco

Co-Founder, CEO: Vipul Ved Prakash

Together AI offers a cloud platform for building and running GenAI and allows users to deploy in a variety of secure clouds.

The startup boasts a cloud infrastructure that runs Nvidia GPUs and networks across AI cloud partners including Crusoe Cloud and Vultr, which provides users better economics on pre-training and inference workloads, according to Together.

Assisting the startup on its mission is a $102.5 million Series A round of funding secured in November. Kleiner Perkins led the round with participating investors including Nvidia and Emergence Capital.

Together plans to use the money toward new products and scaling services for AI integration into applications, according to the startup.

Prakash co-founded the company in 2022. He previously co-founded Topsy in 2007 and sold it to Apple in 2013. He worked at Apple for another five years, leaving in 2018 with the title of senior director, according to his LinkedIn account.

Oxide Computer

Emeryville, Calif.

Co-Founder, CEO: Steve Tuck

At the same time that Oxide Computer unveiled its commercial cloud computer system in October, the startup said it had raised a $44 million Series A round of funding to help accelerate production.

Eclipse led the round, with participation from Intel Capital, Riot Ventures, Counterpart Ventures and Rally Ventures, according to the startup.

Oxide’s system is true rack-scale with unified hardware and software for on-premises cloud computing. The pitch to customers is a unified product that delivers public cloud developer experiences and operational efficiencies to on-premises environments.

With this, users gain the ability to buy computers that run the cloud, not rent them, according to Oxide. A fully configured rack weighs about 2,500 pounds. The rack system measures about 93 x 24 x 42 inches.

Tuck co-founded the startup in 2019. He previously worked at Joyent for about 10 years, leaving with the title of president and COO, according to his LinkedIn account.