Somewhere in a data center you will never see, a server boots itself, picks an operating system, configures its own RAID, joins a network fabric, and reports for duty. Nobody plugged in a cable. Nobody flashed firmware at 2 a.m. That quiet bit of choreography is the entire point of MetalSoft.
01 / Who they are nowThe cloud, minus the cloud
For a decade the industry told one story: move everything to the public cloud and never touch a screwdriver again. MetalSoft sells the plot twist. The Chicago company makes software that takes the servers, switches, and storage a company already owns - from Dell, HPE, Cisco, Lenovo, Supermicro, NVIDIA, whoever - and makes them feel like Amazon. Click a button, get infrastructure. The hardware stays bolted to the floor; the experience floats.
Its platform, now branded CloudPlex, does the unglamorous work that keeps data centers human-staffed: discovering hardware on the network, deploying operating systems and firmware, wiring up network fabrics, carving out storage, and then handing the keys to end users through a simple UI or an API. The tagline says it plainly - "your infrastructure at the speed of AI." The subtext is sharper: the metal you own should not be slower to use than the metal you rent.
Our capability to fully automate hardware - switches, servers, and storage across multiple vendors and data centers - and then "cloudify" them is unparalleled.
Lucas Roh, Co-founder & CEOTranslation: the boring part of computing, automated so thoroughly it almost gets interesting.
02 / The problem they sawHardware forgot how to be easy
Here is the inconvenient truth the public cloud papered over: physical infrastructure is a chore. A single rack can hold gear from five vendors, each with its own management interface, firmware quirks, and failure modes. Standing up a cluster the old way meant tickets, scripts, spreadsheets, and a person walking the aisles. The cloud didn't solve that problem so much as hide it behind someone else's wall - and charge rent for the privilege.
Then the bill came due. Enterprises started doing the math on egress fees, GPU scarcity, data-residency rules, and the slow realization that "someone else's computer" has opinions about your roadmap. The result is what MetalSoft cheerfully calls the reverse-cloud trend: workloads quietly walking back on-premises. Which is lovely, except the on-premises world still ran on tickets and screwdrivers. The wall came down and the chore was waiting, exactly where everyone left it.
The cloud didn't make infrastructure easy. It made someone else responsible for it being hard.
The central tension, stated plainlyA third act in infrastructure
Lucas Roh has built this neighborhood before. He founded the hosting company Hostway and the cloud provider Bigstep, which is to say he has spent a career on the deeply unfashionable side of computing - the part with cables. MetalSoft is the third act, and it didn't arrive out of nowhere. The software went into production inside Hostway in 2014, ran in anger for five years, and only spun out as its own company in 2019. The first outside customers signed in 2021.
The bet was contrarian by design. While most of the venture world chased the next application layer, Roh wagered that the layer underneath - the metal itself - was the one nobody had properly automated, and the one a returning generation of on-premises workloads would desperately need. In December 2022 the wager got a vote of confidence: a $16 million Series A led by DNS Capital, the private investment office of the Pritzker-Pucker family.
A founder who keeps coming back to the part of the stack everyone else is trying to abstract away. Suspicious. Possibly wise.
One blueprint, every vendor
The clever move inside CloudPlex is the blueprint: a single definition of your whole infrastructure - servers, networking, storage - that the platform makes real across data centers and across vendors. Bare Metal Manager provisions and lifecycles the servers, handling OS install, BIOS, RAID, and firmware. Fabric Manager automates the switch fabrics and EVPN networking, tracking topology and segmenting tenants so the marketing team's cluster can't wander into the bank's. Storage volumes, IP allocation, and snapshots configure themselves.
More recently the company aimed all of this at the most expensive metal in the building: GPUs. "MetalSoft for AI Factories" rolls out NVIDIA and AMD infrastructure from Day 1 deployment through Day 2 operations, with multi-tenant security and sandboxing so data scientists can break things in isolation. The platform now markets AI-enabled autonomous operations and root-cause analysis - the software watching the hardware, so the humans don't have to.
GPU sprawl is just server sprawl wearing a more expensive jacket. Same chore, larger invoice.
On why AI made bare metal urgent againMilestones
Names on the rack
A thesis is just a pitch deck until someone runs their production on it. MetalSoft's customer roster reads like a list of organizations that cannot afford for the metal to misbehave: telcos, data center operators, an insurer, a systems integrator. At its Series A the company described customers managing hundreds of thousands of devices, including a major telco and major data center and cloud providers. Multiple Fortune 500 companies are in the mix.
A telco, a data-center operator, and an insurer walk into a rack. None of them want to talk about firmware. That's the sale.
Where the $16M went
Directional, not audited - the company cited sales, marketing, and product development as its priorities. Bars illustrate stated emphasis, not exact line items.
Infrastructure as code, for real this time
"Infrastructure as code" has been a slogan for years, usually meaning "the virtual stuff, if you squint." MetalSoft's ambition is to drag the phrase down to the physical layer - to make a power-hungry, multi-vendor, firmware-cursed data center as declarative as a config file. Define it once; the platform reconciles reality to match. Add compliance regimes like DORA and the EU AI Act, and the pitch sharpens: governance that used to be a hardware problem becomes a software one.
There is a tidy irony here. The same automation that lets a bank run its own private cloud is what lets a service provider sell bare metal cloud to everyone else. MetalSoft sits underneath both, indifferent to which way the workloads are migrating this quarter. When the cloud is winning, providers need it to scale. When the cloud is losing, enterprises need it to come home. The chore never goes away; MetalSoft just wants to own the tooling for it.
The metal you own should never be slower to use than the metal you rent.
The whole company in one sentenceThe AI factory needs a floor
Every breathless headline about AI is, eventually, a story about hardware. Models do not train in the abstract; they train on rooms full of GPUs that cost more than houses and run hotter than ovens. Someone has to provision them, isolate tenants on them, patch their firmware, and figure out why node 47 stopped answering. That someone is increasingly software - and MetalSoft has spent a decade building exactly that software, back when the most exciting thing in the rack was a web server.
Which brings us back to that self-booting server in a room you'll never visit. A few years ago it was a clever convenience. Today it's the difference between an AI cluster that earns its electricity bill and one that sits idle waiting on a ticket. MetalSoft's bet was never really about bare metal. It was about refusing to accept that physical infrastructure has to be hard. The hardware still hums in the dark, anonymous and unglamorous. It just answers faster now.
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