infrastructure-automation
(13)
Antimetal: the fix is only the beginning
Antimetal began by trimming cloud bills. Now it wants to run production systems - with an AI that keeps watching after the engineer declares victory.
ScaleOps and the expensive art of playing it safe
Cloud engineers have excellent reasons to reserve too much computing power. ScaleOps sells a way to change that habit without making production the experiment.
SoftLayer made the cloud a place you could touch
The Dallas company put dedicated servers on a self-service menu. IBM paid $2 billion for the business, but the more useful story is how SoftLayer made physical hardware behave like software.
Secure-24 and the Trouble With a Fast Report
When a business report finishes suspiciously quickly, someone may open a support ticket. Secure-24 built a business around the machinery behind such moments - and NTT bought the company to help run enterprise applications worldwide.
Spacelift and the Button Everyone Was Afraid to Press
Spacelift’s cleverest product is not infrastructure automation. It is permission: a way for more people to change the cloud without turning every deployment into a trust fall.
The Robot They Let Into Production
Cloud engineers are paid to fear surprises. Sedai built a business by asking them to let software change production anyway - one reversible, measurable step at a time.
Gregory Penza Built a Robot for the Streets Nobody Wants Dug Up
A failed sewer robot gave the Long Island contractor a useful grievance. He answered with machines that work inside live utility pipes - and a company built around fewer holes, shorter closures and better Tuesdays above ground.
The Robot in the Gas Main: How ULC Turned Fewer Holes in the Street Into a $40 Million Business
Utilities do not buy robots because robots are charming. They buy fewer excavations, shorter closures and safer work - and ULC Technologies learned to sell exactly that outcome.
DevZero Was Selling Developer Speed. Then Its Kubernetes Bill Exposed the Bigger Business.
The Seattle startup raised $26 million to move development off laptops. Then its own cloud margins revealed a better product: software that cuts Kubernetes and AI waste without making reliability the price of admission.
RoboDock
RoboDock is a San Francisco robotics startup (Y Combinator W26) building the physical automation layer for electric and autonomous vehicle depots. Its robots plug in chargers, align to charge ports with vision guidance, and run post-trip inspections using visual and thermal sensing - turning depots that still rely on people walking rows of vehicles into self-running infrastructure. Founded in 2025 by Stanford classmates Zinny Weli (CEO) and Celine Wang (CTO), the company offers its system as a retrofit that drops into existing facilities without layout changes.
Perforce Software
Perforce Software builds the version control, DevOps, and quality tools that large engineering teams lean on when their codebases and binary assets grow too big for ordinary tools. Its flagship - Helix Core, rebranded P4 in 2025 - moves enormous game studios, semiconductor designers, automakers, and defense programs along, while a portfolio gathered through acquisitions (Puppet, Perfecto, Delphix, Klocwork, Gliffy and more) extends from source control into static analysis, test automation, infrastructure automation, and test data management. Founded in 1995 and now backed by Clearlake Capital and Francisco Partners, Perforce powers more than half of the Global 500.
Venkat Thiruvengadam
Venkat Thiruvengadam is the founder and CEO of DuploCloud, a no-code/low-code DevSecOps platform headquartered in San Jose, California. A founding member of Microsoft Azure's networking team, he wrote core parts of Azure's compute and network controller stack before building DuploCloud to bring hyperscale cloud automation - previously available only to giants like AWS and Microsoft - to mainstream enterprises. Under his leadership, DuploCloud has raised $52M in total funding (including a $32M Series B in 2023), grown ARR by 700% since 2021, and serves 100+ customers across healthcare, fintech, and enterprise software.
Jesse Robbins
Jesse Robbins is General Partner at Heavybit, the San Francisco-based venture firm focused exclusively on developer-first companies. He co-founded Chef (sold to Progress Software for $200M+), invented GameDay chaos engineering at Amazon where he held the title 'Master of Disaster', and co-created the O'Reilly Velocity Conference that seeded the global DevOps movement. A former volunteer firefighter and EMT, he brings a crisis-responder's instincts to early-stage investing, backing companies like Snyk, PagerDuty, Fastly, LaunchDarkly, and Tailscale. His portfolio spans 60+ companies with five IPOs.