Companies that move their operations to cloud computing infrastructure are missing out on many of the perceived benefits of this shift because they don’t know how to manage their new arrangements. That’s what technology start-up says Brightnesswhich is today announcing a $5.3 million seed funding round as it seeks to scale its business with cloud management solutions to address this problem.
“Cloud is not a panacea that automatically solves all your technology problems,” warns Nitin Bhadauria, one of the co-founders of Lucidity. “In many cases, companies simply move their existing processes and systems to the cloud; they end up with many of the same problems and challenges.”
The result is disappointment, Bhadauria warns. “CIOs promise their CFOs significant returns on cloud investments, but many of them fail to deliver.”
Moreover, this is a growing problem. The move to the cloud has accelerated tremendously over the past three years, with three clear drivers driving organizations away from on-premise solutions.
First, the massive explosion in data volumes, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath, has dramatically increased the demands on organizations’ data centers and systems. Second, meeting that demand has become more difficult due to a global shortage of semiconductors, limiting hardware availability. And third, many companies are hesitant to make the large capital investments required by the data explosion anyway; by switching to cloud arrangements, they can effectively transition to managing this technology through corporate spend.
Making the leap to the cloud — mimicking the cloud-native companies that have emerged over the past 15 years and avoided on-premises solutions altogether — indeed offers a potential route through these issues. But that journey must be carefully planned and managed, warns Vatsal Rastogi, co-founder of Lucidity.
“Eight out of ten organizations simply lift and shift,” he warns. “But to deliver the returns organizations are looking for, you need cloud storage that’s smartly managed.” The analogy, he suggests, is with someone moving house to lower their rent, only to find they’re worse off because their furniture needs to be replaced or because they have to commute longer. The move must be scheduled in the round.
Lucidity co-founders Vatsal Rastogi and Nitin Bhadauria
The biggest problem, Lucidity believes, is that many organizations are paying far too much for cloud storage because they fear failure if their data suddenly or unexpectedly spikes. Overprovisioning of this type averages 70%, Lucidity says, and even then outages still occur. And with a dire shortage of cloud specialists worldwide in the technology sector, most organizations cannot tackle these problems on their own.
That’s where Lucidity believes its product can help. It is a software solution that sits on top of the customer’s cloud arrangements and manages storage to automatically scale in size according to requirements, in real time. In one fell swoop, customers can ditch their overprovisioning, Lucidity says, while making sure there is no downtime at all.
“Manual cloud management results in a 70% waste of storage costs,” Rastogi says of the savings he believes Lucidity can bring. The company also prides itself on its low-maintenance model — it says installations take about 15 minutes, with an additional hour of configurations, after which the software runs automatically with no further intervention required. Lucidity describes its approach as “NoOps”.
Launched in 2021, Lucidity took approximately nine months to build its solution and has been working with a small number of enterprises since earlier this year, with nine customers now having different product implementations. The solution is sector and geographic agnostic, although Lucidity is primarily focused on the North American market and appears to be attracting the most interest from financial services, retail, technology, media and entertainment companies.
The next phase for the company is further product development and building awareness and understanding among potential customers. “Nine in ten companies don’t realize how much money they are wasting,” says Bhadauria.
Today’s fundraising will help in this regard, providing Lucidity with funding to invest in expanding its engineering and development capabilities through fundraising, as well as its go-to-market strategies.
The company’s starting round is led by AlphaWave Investments, with participation from Beenext, Blume Ventures, BoldCapital, NuVentures and Sparrow Capital. It follows a $500,000 pre-seed round led by Beenext in 2021.
“Lucidity makes cloud storage management more streamlined and reliable, and also increases cloud storage performance while saving a significant amount of money,” said Andrew Martinez of AlphaWave. “This is not just a theoretical concept, but something fully rendered as proof of concepts with customers now boarding the Lucidity platform.”
