The 10 Coolest Cloud Computing Startup Companies Of 2023

From CoreWeave and Cast AI to Pulumi and Wiz, CRN breaks down the 10 hottest cloud computing startups of 2023 that are disrupting the market.

Cloud computing startup companies are on fire in 2023 as artificial intelligence accelerates cloud adoption and customer demand.

Cloud startups like CoreWeave and Wiz witnessed their company valuations explode into the billions this year, while others such as Pulumi and Cast AI raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.

The hottest cloud startups in 2023 focus on cutting cloud computing costs via optimization and automation, driving new AI and machine learning use cases, helping businesses sell via cloud marketplaces, and so much more. Some of these startups formed new or enhanced relationships with cloud titans Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft, while others launched offerings to compete directly against public cloud providers.

CRN breaks down the 10 coolest cloud computing startups that every investor, solution provider and cloud customer should know about.

[Related: Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud Market Share Q3 2023 Results]

Cloud Services Market Hits $68 Billion In Q3 2023

Worldwide enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services—which many of the cloud startups on CRN’s list provide—reached a record $68 billion in third-quarter 2023.

This represented global growth of $10.5 billion year over year as generative AI demands and services continue to thwart any economic disruption.

“For the last three quarters the market grew by around $10 billion compared with 2022. In Q3 that incremental annual growth nudged up to $10.5 billion. Take a bow, AI,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst and managing director at Synergy Research Group. “As an already massive cloud market keeps on growing, the year-on-year growth rate almost inevitably declines. But we are now starting to see a stabilization of growth rates, as cloud provider investments in generative AI technology help to further boost enterprise spending on cloud services. It is still early days for generative AI, but the technology will help to keep cloud growth buoyant over the coming years.”

The growing need for new cloud platforms, AI-powered cloud offerings, cybersecurity, public cloud management and services is being met head-on by these innovative startups. Click through for an in-depth look at the 10 coolest cloud computing startups of 2023:

*Aviatrix Systems

*Cast AI

*CoreWeave

*Impossible Cloud

*LucidLink

*Tackle.io

*Pulumi

*Privacera

*Wiz

*Yotascale

Aviatrix Systems

Top Executive: Doug Merritt, President, CEO

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

As growth continued in 2023, Aviatrix Systems in July hired Splunk’s former, CEO Doug Merritt, to take over the reins of the cloud networking startup.

Aviatrix creates a repeatable cloud networking offering aimed at optimizing customers’ cloud operational models alongside custom automation capabilities for each cloud provider such as Microsoft, AWS and Google Cloud. The startup provides a cloud network backbone for applications by creating a simplified and consistent networking architecture in and across cloud providers to help customers focus on analyzing cloud data and understand their usage and cloud optimization options on an ongoing basis.

In May, the company launched its own Distributed Cloud Firewall that provides inspection and policy enforcement into the pathway of application traffic to eliminate the need to redirect traffic to other firewalls or security services.

Cast AI

Top Executive: Yuri Frayman, Co-Founder, CEO

Headquarters: Miami

Cast AI provides a Kubernetes automation platform that helps teams streamline their cloud cost management, operations and security across AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud.

The startup’s platform goes beyond monitoring clusters and making recommendations by utilizing advanced machine learning algorithms to analyze and automatically optimize clusters. Cast AI said it can save customers 50 percent or more on their cloud spend, improving performance and reliability and boosting DevOps and engineering productivity.

Following a $20 million investment round in March, the startup raised an additional $35 million in November to fund enhancements to its cloud optimization platform. Cast AI’s product road map includes the introduction of seasonality models to better predict resource needs across varying time cycles, further bolstering response time and availability.

CoreWeave

Top Executive: Michael Intrator, CEO

Headquarters: Roseland, N.J.

CoreWeave is a specialized cloud provider, delivering a massive scale of GPU compute resources on demand on top of flexible infrastructure. The startup said it builds cloud offerings for compute-intensive use cases, such as AI and pixel streaming, which are up to 35X faster and 80 percent less expensive than public clouds.

CoreWeave has jumped on the AI bandwagon this year and aims to power large language models and generative AI with purpose-built cloud infrastructure at scale.

In early 2023, the startup raised over $421 million in a Series B funding round. In August, the company secured $2.3 billion in debt financing facility. CoreWeave will use the new funding to open new data centers, boost its head count and add new cloud capabilities.

Impossible Cloud

Top Executive: Dr. Kai Wawrzinek, Co-Founder, CEO

Headquarters: Hamburg, Germany

Impossible Cloud is a cloud storage specialist that provides decentralized, multi-services cloud offerings. The startup’s platform is based on web3 technology and decentralized infrastructure, which allows it to be scalable and cost-effective.

With its unique web3 capabilities, Impossible Cloud can boost computing, cloud costs as well as security—supporting almost unlimited capacity. By tapping into underutilized capacity from top-tier data centers, Impossible Cloud enables off-site, disaster-resistant storage that is Kubernetes-friendly and S3-compatible.

Impossible Cloud said that with just a single line of code, businesses can access Impossible Cloud’s storage. This year, the startup launched its Partner Program to helps partners implement, demo and integrate its offerings with partners including Acronis and Comet Backup.

LucidLink

Top Executive: Peter Thompson, Co-Founder, CEO

Headquarters: San Francisco

LucidLink aims to solve the problem of distance and latency in cloud computing environments by reducing the traffic between applications and remote storage. By dramatically boosting responsiveness, the startup said it enables file data to be delivered efficiently and streamed on-demand.

The startup can boost cloud performance via its data prefetching based on an adaptive algorithm, parallel transmission control protocol streams, local write-back caching and in-line compression. LucidLink also offers advanced file capabilities such as direct read/write access from the cloud, automatic snapshots, user access control and global file locking.

LucidLink’s cloud offering connects remote teams to project files of any size and type instantly.Thompson spent 14 years in top roles at DataCore Software before co-founding LucidLink.

Privacera

Top Executive: Balaji Ganesan, Co-Founder, CEO

Headquarters: Fremont, Calif.

Privacera is a cloud data governance and security specialist that was founded by the creators of Apache Ranger. The cloud startup invested heavily in AI this year, launching Privacera AI Governance that provides continuous scanning and classification of training data to secure and audit AI models, model outputs and user requests.

Privacera’s cloud-based SaaS data security and access governance platform enables teams to simplify data access, security and privacy for data applications and analytical workloads. The startup provides a unified view and control for securing sensitive data across multiple cloud services such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Databricks, Google Cloud Platform, Snowflake and Starburst.

Before co-founding Privacera, Ganesan was senior director of enterprise security for Hortonworks.

Pulumi

Top Executive: Joe Duffy, CEO

Headquarters: Seattle

Pulumi has raised approximately $100 million in funding while releasing new products in 2023 targeting cloud infrastructure around platform engineering and infrastructure as code.

The venture-backed startup aims to advance cloud infrastructure security and infrastructure for cloud applications such as generative AI. The Pulumi Platform enables customers to manage 10 times more cloud resourses at lower cost than traditional tools, the company said, while its Pulumi Insights offering unlocks analytics and search across cloud infrastructure and allows AI-driven infrastructure automation.

Other offerings include Pulumi CrossGuard for automating compliance and best practices to enforce rules on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Kubernetes. Prior to founding Pulumi in 2018, Duffy spent 12 years at Microsoft in top engineering roles as well as four years at EMC.

Tackle.io

Top Executive: John Jahnke, CEO

Headquarters: Boise, Idaho

As more businesses buy cloud computing solutions via digital marketplaces such as the AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace, Tackle.io helps companies generate revenue through these marketplaces.

The startup provides a platform to enable companies of all shapes and sizes to launch, build and scale their solutions across the most popular cloud marketplaces in the world. Tackle.io’s Cloud GTM Platform offers Marketplace buyers intent data and streamlines the path to transacting through the major cloud providers, while also connecting multiple Cloud Marketplaces, their co-sell portals and Salesforce to scale revenue efficiently.

In July, Tackle.io formed a collaboration with AWS to help ISVs accelerate their cloud go-to-market journey. The partnerships provide ISVs the software and services needed to scale with AWS by driving a complete go-to-market motion through co-sell and AWS Marketplace.

Wiz

Top Executive: Assaf Rappaport, CEO

Headquarters: New York

One of the hottest cloud startups in the world in 2023 is Wiz, which 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. 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 founding Wiz in 2020, Rappaport was general manager of R&D in Israel for Microsoft.

Yotascale

Top Executive: Asim Razzaq, Co-Founder, CEO

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

Yotascale is laser-focused on providing cloud services for managing and budgeting a business’ cloud spending while at the same time helping cloud engineers optimize utilization.

Yotascale specializes in FinOps cloud cost management software with cloud observability and predictability by giving customers a complete view of their multi-cloud infrastructure spending, including containers and Kubernetes. The startup offers tools to automate and maintain the resource tags and labels that are foundational to cloud cost management, as well as machine leaning-powered forecasting with predictive analytics based on historical spending trends.

The startup said that it can predict cloud spend with a more than 95 percent accuracy rate and send detailed alerts on potential budget overruns and cost anomalies.