data-center-automation
(2)
MetalSoft
MetalSoft is a Chicago-based infrastructure software company that turns racks of physical servers, switches, and storage into cloud-like, self-service infrastructure. Its CloudPlex platform automates the full lifecycle of multi-vendor bare metal hardware - discovery, OS and firmware deployment, network fabric configuration, and storage - so enterprises and service providers can provision dedicated infrastructure on demand via a UI or API. Spun out of cloud hosting company Hostway in 2019 and led by serial founder Lucas Roh, MetalSoft raised a $16M Series A in December 2022 and has since pivoted hard toward orchestrating GPU clusters and 'AI factories' for telcos, data center operators, and Fortune 500 enterprises.
Lucas Roh
Lucas Roh is a serial entrepreneur and computer scientist who founded and runs MetalSoft, a Chicago-based startup whose software automates bare metal data centers - turning racks of multi-vendor switches, servers, and storage into cloud-like, on-demand infrastructure. A former Argonne National Laboratory researcher in automatic differentiation, he built the global web host Hostway (1998-2013), launched the big data cloud Bigstep, and spun MetalSoft out of Hostway's internal tooling in 2019. In December 2022 MetalSoft raised a $16 million Series A led by DNS Capital.