Hasura snares $1.6 M seed for developer-focused Kubernetes solution

Kubernetes has gained in popularity quickly over the last 18 months, but like many highly technical solutions it requires a level of expertise many companies are lacking. A Bangalore/San Francisco startup called Hasura hopes to simplify all of that with a managed Kubernetes solution built with developers in mind.

Today, the company announced a $1.6 million seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from GREE Ventures.

Kubernetes is a tool that helps companies running containers juggle or orchestrate them. This level of organization is required because the number of containers can grow quickly. If you think of a conductor telling the musicians when to come in and when to leave, Kubernetes plays a similar role for the container system. (For a more complete explanation of containers, see this article.)

The company has focused on getting developers up to speed with the latest technologies quickly. “Our focus from the beginning has been making the application development super fast. How we do that is placing our APIs on top of a PostGres database to deploy any kind of code,” Tanmai Gopal, Hasura CEO and co-founder explained.

Gopal says the idea is to be more than a managed Kubernetes provider by giving developers the tooling they need to get going without having to build the underlying code for every application. “We are going to be the last mile. We’re not just managing the Kubernetes cluster for you. You should have Kubernetes to have control [over your containerized applications], but you also need developer tooling to build on top of it faster,” he said. “We want to automate the unnecessary code writing kind of grunt work. We started off by saying, ‘let’s automate this piece so you don’t have to write this code again’,” he added.

Once they wrote that piece, they realized that this is relevant because this approach enables cloud native in way that wasn’t possible before. “We suddenly realized we were in the right place at the right time, and part of it was luck,” Gopal admitted. It was also skill in providing a set of tools developers could use to build on top of Kubernetes.

Sameer Brij Verma, managing director at lead investor Nexus Venture Partners sees Kubernetes quickly becoming a foundational technology for developers and Hasura is providing a way to get up and running with little expertise. “Using Hasura’s platform, developers can now create cloud-native, portable and “elastic” applications within a few minutes without knowing anything about Kubernetes in the beginning,” Verma said in a statement.

The company launched last year and is split between Bangalore, India and San Francisco.

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