When Sam Weaver was Unqork’s vice president of product management, he realized that there was a need for a better way to manage the vast network of Kubernetes clusters, a group of computing nodes. When Unqork found nothing from the shelf, it assembled a team of 15 to build a Kubernetes management product. Despite the multi-million dollar cost, Weaver said the resulting platform is OK.
“I think to myself. There must be a better way to do this,” Weaver told TechCrunch. “I mean, what we built was good enough, but it was never perfect and it took about two years to build.”
Weaver (pictured at right) sat on the idea until he met Michael Guarino, a notable engineer at companies including Amazon and Twitter. When Weaver explained the problem to Guarino, he was surprised by his reaction: Guarino thought the problem was relatively easy to solve. Guarino then built a better system himself in a few weeks.
The platform became the basis of the plural. The company’s platform integrates enterprise Kubernetes clusters into a single dashboard, allowing businesses to streamline operations, manage these clusters, and deploy upgrades from one central spot.
Multiple AI can also provide suggestions for optimizing cluster efficiency and diagnosing scaling problems, Weaver said. The plural is cloud and LLM agnostic.
Weaver said multiple hopes for developers are to extend time for developers, as there is no need to search for information or bugs in Kubernetes clusters. He added that the company can help the team perform updates in hours rather than weeks.
“This reduces operational overhead by about 90%, something we saw with our users and our customers,” Weaver said. “People are really excited because they can actually go and get productive work done.”
Weaver said the timing of this solution was correct. Over the past few years, businesses have gone from managing one Kubernetes cluster to multiple. This is a trend that is accelerated by the rise of AI.
“There are a lot of cows running around that can’t be handled as individual clusters anymore,” Weaver said. “Until now, people have taken many open source tools from the ecosystem. There are 2,000 projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem.”
The plural was founded in 2021 and soon afterwards released the original version of the platform. According to Weaver, the company currently works with multiple corporate customers in markets such as financial services and other regulatory industries, but refuses to disclose certain customer names or numbers.
The startup also recently joined a $6 million seed round led by Primary Venture Partners from Capital One Ventures and Company Ventures. Weaver said the team set out to raise $3 million but after seeing strong demand it ended up double the round. The company wants to deepen its product capabilities and eventually put money in to explore areas outside of Kubernetes.
The plural does not just address sprawls in Kubernetes clusters. Competitors include Loft Labs, a startup that raised $28.6 million in venture capital, and $95 million in 2020 before Suse acquired it for $600 million.
Weaver believes that Plural’s biggest differentiator is its architecture. He specifically stated the fact that the plural forms run on the Gitops model, and that product is self-hosted by each customer, and each Kubernetes cluster has its own AI agent running on top of it.
“The Enterprise basically has total control over how and where this is deployed,” Weaver said. “The data is not sent home. It’s not a SaaS service. We’re bowing our heads. We’re focusing on adding it to the Kubernetes management platform we have.
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