On August 16, 2022, Sync Computing, an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost Management, announced a $15.5 million round of equity and debt financing led by Costanoa Ventures with participation from prior investors The Engine, Moore Strategic Ventures, and National Grid Partners. Sync Computing has already differentiated itself in the cloud infrastructure optimization market for its capabilities to automate the provisioning and orchestration of cloud both from a cost and runtime perspective based on a proprietary mathematical approach (an oscillator-based Ising machine for those seeking the primary technical inspiration used in Sync applied to optimizing data pipelines) covered in our Cloud Cost Management SmartList. From a business perspective, this means two things: cost management and improved performance.
Amalgam Insights believes that this funding round will help Sync Computing to further enhance its differentiation in the current cloud cost and infrastructure optimization markets as data and machine learning companies seek a starting point to help them to identify cost and performance opportunities, provide options to improve either the cost-basis or revenue-enhancing aspects of infrastructure, and implement these capabilities. This announcement included the general availability announcement of an Apache Spark Autotuner, which will allow data engineers to broadly optimize data environments. We also believe that this funding will help Sync Computing to accelerate the roadmap items described in our SmartList, including enhanced support for both their Autotuner and Orchestrator products to support Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure as well as Kubernetes cluster management support and support for PyTorch and TensorFlow.
As a side note, Amalgam Insights believes this construction of financing is a smart move as it reduces the amount of equity that Sync Computing’s founders need to give up in order to obtain the cash they are receiving to run the company. If the company grows as expected, the interest rate associated with debt will be less than the cost of equity given up in the long run. Given the nature of Sync Computing’s offering at a time when enterprises are seeking to rationalize and optimize their big data and machine learning environments, this bet seems wise.
The involvement of Costanoa Ventures is significant as it has emerged as a top-tier venture capital firm for supporting data and machine learning infrastructure management with portfolio investments including Alation, Bigeye, and Pepperdata as well as a variety of AI-enabled applications ranging from 6sense to Intacct to Lex Machina, all of which have been acquired.
With this round of funding, Amalgam Insights believes Sync Computing is well-positioned to continue on its currently unique path of supporting the combination of recommenations, automated configuration, cost management, and performance optimization without requiring additional investment in headcount or skills.