He wants the cold steel in your data center - the switches, the servers, the storage - to answer to a single click. At MetalSoft, the hardware finally behaves like a cloud.
Most founders pitch a blank page. Lucas Roh pitched a working machine. MetalSoft, the company he runs today as founder and CEO, did not spring from a whiteboard sketch. It was the software his web-hosting company wrote to run its own data centers - code that quietly went into production in 2014, kept the lights on for years, and only in 2019 was set loose as a company of its own.
The idea is deceptively plain. Public cloud feels like magic because you never see the metal. You click, a server appears, you stop paying when you stop clicking. But underneath every cloud is a warehouse of physical hardware that someone, somewhere, still has to rack, cable, flash, and configure by hand. MetalSoft's software automates that grubby physical layer - switches, servers, and storage, across multiple vendors and multiple sites - and makes it consumable on demand. Roh calls it cloudifying the hardware.
In December 2022 that pitch landed a $16 million Series A led by DNS Capital, bringing total funding to roughly $17 million. The customers are not hobbyists. Roh has described a roster that includes a major telco and large data center and cloud service providers, some running hundreds of thousands of devices on the platform. For a company most people have never heard of, that is a lot of metal.
What makes Roh interesting is not that he is doing this. It is that he keeps doing this. MetalSoft is at least his fourth company, and every one of them has circled the same stubborn problem: making infrastructure boring, reliable, and cheap.
Our capability to fully automate hardware - switches, servers, and storage - across multiple vendors and data centers, and then cloudifying them, is unparalleled.- Lucas Roh, on what MetalSoft actually does
Before there was a single startup, there was a lab. Roh studied physics at the University of Chicago, then earned a doctorate in computer science from Colorado State University. He spent his early career as a computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, the U.S. research institution west of Chicago, working in the then-emerging field of automatic differentiation - a corner of computational mathematics concerned with getting machines to calculate exact derivatives of programs.
It is an unusually deep scientific resume for a hosting-industry founder. He published more than a dozen academic papers and holds several patents. The thread that runs from a national lab to a server rack is not obvious until you notice the pattern: Roh likes problems where messy, manual, error-prone work can be replaced by something precise and automatic. Automatic differentiation does it for math. MetalSoft does it for hardware.
The lab also explains the temperament. This is a founder who talks about cost per device and labor reduction, not disruption and moonshots. The romance, for Roh, is in the efficiency.
Automatic differentiation taught computers to do calculus without a human checking every step. Decades later, MetalSoft teaches data centers to provision themselves without a technician at every rack.
Same instinct. Different machine.
Roh does not chase whatever is fashionable. Look at what he has built and a single fixation appears again and again: making infrastructure self-serve, automated, and affordable.
Global web hosting and cloud services company. Founded it, ran it as CEO, sold it. The mother ship MetalSoft later spun out of.
Big data orchestration on a high-performance bare-metal cloud - a full-stack ecosystem for organizations trying to make sense of their data.
One more venture in the hosting and infrastructure orbit where Roh has served as founder and chairman.
The spinout. Bare metal automation software for on-premises data centers and multi-vendor equipment. The current main act.
Strip away the jargon and MetalSoft does four things to a room full of hardware nobody wants to configure by hand.
Finds the hardware sitting on the network - servers, switches, storage - whoever made it.
Auto-installs OS and firmware, configures storage volumes and network settings.
Visual infrastructure blueprints turn a rack into something you can wire up like Lego.
The metal becomes available on demand - cloud-like self-service, on your own hardware.
Computer scientist researching automatic differentiation. Publishes papers, files patents, builds the scientific foundation.
Launches the global web hosting company and takes the CEO chair. The start of a 15-year run.
Guides the company to a successful sale.
Hostway's internal hardware-management software enters production - the code that becomes MetalSoft.
Builds out a big data cloud and stays chairman across multiple infrastructure ventures.
The software leaves the nest as an independent company, aimed at other providers and enterprises.
DNS Capital leads the round to fund end-to-end data center automation.
MetalSoft pushes AI and machine learning into the platform for intelligent hardware management and cloud-native workloads.
Roh has a knack for selling unglamorous efficiency at exactly the moment it stops being optional. As IT spending tightened, his framing sharpened: fewer technicians per rack, lower cost per device, the same functionality for the end user.
“We help reduce the cost of IT and we have become even more important in a more stringent spending environment.”
“We provide a turnkey solution to service providers to offer cloud services.”
“There is a growing recognition in the marketplace for an automated hardware management solution.”
“We see a growing opportunity for a bare metal software platform designed from the ground up for better automation, performance, and cost-savings - while delivering modern cloud-like features.”
“We give our customers the choice of operating our software on their own, having us operate it, or embedding it as part of their as-a-service model.”
MetalSoft is really a 2014-vintage product that earned its independence in 2019. Roh shipped before he raised.
His pre-founder job was research scientist at Argonne, working on automatic differentiation. The math came first.
An undergraduate physics degree from the University of Chicago, then a computer science doctorate from Colorado State.
Hostway, Bigstep, Affinity, MetalSoft. Different names, same fixation on automated infrastructure.
The pitch hinges on managing hardware across many vendors and many sites - not locking you into one brand of metal.
He has cited a major telco and large data center operators, some running hundreds of thousands of devices.