Enterprises often overprovision their cloud data storage to keep a buffer for demand peaks, but that comes at a major cost. And while in-house DevOps teams may optimize servers to reduce the impact of these costs, they usually skip optimizing their storage to avoid any accidental data loss or downtime. This leads to significant cloud storage being wasted or poorly utilized.
A Deloitte report citing public surveys says up to 30% of cloud spending is generally wasted due to pay-as-you-go pricing, lack of visibility, overprovisioning, and unplanned costs.
Indian startup Lucidity is hoping to help enterprises address this issue by automating storage optimization on the cloud. Essentially, the startup’s software helps expand or shrink block storage volumes based on real-time data demands. The company says this optimization can help enterprises cut their cloud costs by up to 70%.
The company has raised a $21 million Series A round led by WestBridge Capital to flesh out its team and further develop its products. Existing investor Alpha Wave Global also participated in the round.
On offer here is an application-agnostic layer called NoOps, which integrates within existing apps and environments without requiring any code-level changes, co-founder Nitin Bhadauria (pictured above, on the right) said in an exclusive interview.
Cloud storage providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud provide basic optimization, but Bhadauria pointed out that no one offers a solution to optimize cloud storage. Cloud providers instead focus on building products to let customers deploy more and more data on the cloud.
That may be one reason why the four-year-old startup does not see any significant competitors in the market.
“Our bigger competitor is no one else actually in this industry,” Bhadauria told TechCrunch. “Our bigger competitor is the status quo; currently, customers are not solving this problem. They are aware of it but believe this is how cloud storage is managed.”
Lucidity was founded in 2021 by Vatsal Rastogi (pictured above, on the left) and Bhadauria, who co-founded two SaaS startups in the past. It currently offers two products: Storage Auto-Scaler and Storage Audit.
Storage Auto-Scaler dynamically expands and shrinks block storage on cloud servers. It is deployed as an agent in the server and starts the optimization process within an hour of its deployment, Bhadauria explained. He declined to divulge further details on the tech, saying the company is filing patents for it.
“We are able to only resize the buffer without touching data directly. Because of this capability, we can ensure that customers can see cost savings without getting worried about any issues or downtime,” he said.
Storage Audit, meanwhile, is a free-to-use tool that lets enterprises determine how much of their cloud storage can be freed up and what exactly they spend on it.
Lucidity targets Fortune 2000 companies with more than $1 billion in revenues in the U.S. and Europe. Bhadauria declined to disclose how many customers Lucidity has, but he did say that 70% of its customers are in the U.S., and the rest are in Europe. Of those, 20% are on the Fortune 100.
Lucidity also aims to offer optimization for object storage in the future, Bhadauria said.
This Series A brings the company’s total funding raised to about $32 million. The startup raised $5.3 million in seed funding led by Alpha Wave in September 2022.
Half of the fresh funding, Bhadauria said, will help the startup expand its go-to-market team. The rest will be used to enhance the product.
“We are launching one more product in the next six months,” Bhadauria said, adding the startup plans to introduce multiple modules over time to optimize cloud storage.
The startup has about 100 employees across offices in India, Abu Dhabi, London and the U.S.
