Tech veterans Steve Tuck and Bryan Cantrill have unveiled Oxide, a startup aiming to disrupt the world of on-premise cloud computing. The company has recently announced a successful $44 million Series A funding round to bring its innovative vision to the market. With a combined experience of over four decades in hardware and cloud computing, Tuck and Cantrill are confident that Oxide’s unique approach will revolutionize the way companies view and utilize cloud resources within their own data centers.
Key Takeaway
Oxide, a startup founded by industry veterans Steve Tuck and Bryan Cantrill, has secured $44 million in Series A funding to revolutionize on-premise cloud computing. The company’s unique integrated rack-level hardware and software solution aims to provide cloud-like functionality within the secure environment of a company’s own data center. Oxide challenges the traditional perception of the cloud as a destination for renting capacity, proposing instead a paradigm shift in which the cloud becomes a versatile tool for deploying and managing software.
Rethinking the Cloud as a Destination
Oxide challenges the conventional notion of the cloud as a destination for renting computing capacity. Instead, the founders envision the cloud as a versatile tool that allows businesses to leverage large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources programmatically. With this in mind, Oxide has developed an integrated rack-level hardware and software solution, designed to provide cloud-like functionality within the secure confines of a company’s own data center.
Having spent a decade operating a public cloud infrastructure business, Tuck and Cantrill firmly believe in the future of cloud computing. However, the duo emphasizes that the cloud itself is not the destination, but rather a means to simplify the deployment and management of software. Oxide’s goal is to enable companies to choose between renting or owning resources, without sacrificing the benefits associated with cloud computing, such as elasticity.
Redefining On-Premise Deployment
Recognizing the challenges of traditional on-premise deployments, which often suffer from slow provisioning times, Oxide aims to deliver a faster time-to-value solution. The company has developed a rack-level system consisting of 32 sleds, each comprising an AMD CPU, DRAM, and storage. These resources are pooled together, allowing for effortless scalability. Cantrill describes the process of adding a sled as simple as “snapping it in,” with the deployment time taking a mere three hours from unboxing to being fully operational on the network.
On the software side, Oxide has developed its own firmware, hypervisor, and control plane, providing complete control over the technology stack. This level of autonomy differentiates Oxide from the public cloud offerings, allowing for a highly customizable and efficient infrastructure.
Series A Funding and Market Expansion
Oxide’s groundbreaking solution is currently deployed with a single customer; however, the Series A funding round, led by Eclipse, will enable the company to bring its product to a broader market. Joining the funding round were Intel Capital, Riot Ventures, Counterpart Ventures, and Rally Ventures, bringing Oxide’s total funding to $78 million. The initial capital was instrumental in the development and testing of the innovative hardware and software stack.
