Spotinst raises $15M to help businesses better utilize the cloud

Spotinst, a service that helps businesses optimize their cloud utilization and reduce their cloud computing cost through the use of Amazon’s EC2 spot instances, today announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A round led by Intel Capital, with participation from Vertex Ventures and Springtime Ventures. This brings Spotinst’s funding to date to $17 million.

The original idea behind Spotinst is pretty straightforward. Running workloads on spot instances on AWS and Azure’s low-priority VMs (which are a bit different in concept but also allow you to gain cheap access to Azure’s excess compute capacity) is significantly cheaper than renting a traditional virtual machine — but with the disadvantage that Amazon may shut them down at any time. Spotinst aims to overcome this issue with its Elastigroup technology, which blends on-demand, reserved and spot-instances to create a cluster that’s always available, even if it mostly relies on spot instances. The service is cloud agnostic, but the company’s focus still seems to be mostly on AWS.

Spotinst doesn’t solely focus on spot instances, though. It also helps AWS users better utilize their reserved and on-demand instances. Too often, after all, companies waste quite a bit of money by not fully utilizing the compute performance they have already paid for.

Spotinst says that its business grew 30 percent month-over-month in the last year and that it now “manages hundreds of millions of computing hours for its customers.”

“When we floated the idea of virtual cloud infrastructure two years ago, many said that it could not be done,” said Amiram Shachar, Founder and CEO of Spotinst, in today’s announcement. “But since then companies and developers voted with their workloads. We appreciate their confidence and support from our investors.  The proceeds will help Spotinst grow, and take us closer to our vision of a cloud of clouds.”

The company is getting even closer to this idea of a “cloud of clouds” with the launch of its Spotinst Functions service, which competes with Amazon’s Lambda “serverless” platform. Like Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions, the idea here is to allow you to only run your code when a certain event happens. That way, you only pay for having the service execute your code and you don’t have to worry about managing your servers either. This new service, which is currently in private beta, is platform agnostic and supports the three major public clouds as well as Packet, and will soon also work with IBM and Oracle.