CRN breaks down the 10 coolest cloud computing startup companies that are making waves in 2024 around AI, Kubernetes, multi-cloud networking and other key cloud markets.

The need for new and improved cloud computing solutions is being met head-on by startups in 2024 that are focusing on infrastructure optimization, artificial intelligence and cloud management.

From cloud computing startups such as Astera Labs and Vultr to Prosimo and Weka, there are 10 cloud companies making waves in the ever-growing market.

Many of these cloud startups are partnering and/or competing with the top three cloud market share leaders Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google, who account for a whopping 67 percent of the global market.

[Related: Google Cloud Nabs AWS, Microsoft Copilot Execs To Lead AI]

Cloud Infrastructure Services Market Reach $76 Billion

During the first quarter of 2024, enterprise spending on cloud computing infrastructure services reached over $76 billion. This represented an increase of 21 percent or $13.5 billion compared to Q1 2023, showing just how critical cloud computing is for business across the globe.

“There are still some economic, currency and political headwinds,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, in an email to CRN. “However, the underlying strength of the market is more than compensating for those constraints, aided in no small part by the impact of generative AI technology and services.”

Many of the cloud startups on CRN’s 2024 list are providing computing solutions for AI, generative AI and machine learning workloads.

Here are 10 cloud computing IT startup companies that every partner, investor and business —should know about in 2024.

Cast AI

Top Executive: Yuri Frayman, CEO

Cloud optimization and management startup Cast AI provides a Kubernetes automation platform that helps teams streamline their cloud cost management, operations and security. Cast AI’s platform utilizes machine learning algorithms to analyze and automatically optimize clusters in real time to reduce costs and improve performance to boost DevOps and engineering productivity.

The Miami-based startup said it cuts AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud customers cloud costs by over 50 percent.

Celestial AI

Top Executive: Dave Lazovsky, CEO

Celestial AI’s Photonic Fabric is the industry’s only optical connectivity solution that enables the disaggregation of cloud compute and memory, which allows each component to be leveraged and scaled most effectively. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup’s technology provides greater bandwidth and memory capacity, while reducing latency and power consumption compared to optical interconnect alternatives and copper.

This year, the startup raised $175 million in a Series C funding round, led by investors such as AMD Ventures and Samsung Catalyst, in a move to scale up its commercialization.

CoreWeave

Top Executive: Michael Intrator, CEO

CoreWeave is a specialized cloud provider, delivering a massive scale of GPU compute resources on demand on top of flexible infrastructure. The Roseland, N.J.-based startup builds cloud offerings for compute-intensive use cases like AI which can be up to 35X faster and 80 percent less expensive than public clouds, the company says.

CoreWeave also aims to power large language models and generative AI with purpose-built cloud infrastructure at scale. In May, the startup secured $1.1 billion in new funding.

DuploCloud

Top Executive: Venkat Thiruvengadam, CEO

DuploCloud’s platform translates high-level application specifications into meticulously managed cloud configurations, allowing customers to streamline operations while maintaining security, availability, and compliance standards. The San Jose, Calif.-based startup’s DevOps Automation platform is designed to make DevOps and Infrastructure-as-Code accessible for all developers.

The company was founded by the senior engineers from Microsoft Azure and AWS.

Prosimo

Top Executive: Ramesh Prabagaran, CEO

Prosimo delivers a simplified multi-cloud infrastructure for distributed enterprise clouds. The San Jose, Calif.-based startup’s stack combines cloud networking, performance, security, observability, and cost management—all powered by data insights and machine learning models with autonomous cloud networking.

Prosimo recently launched AI Suite for Multi-Cloud Networking to help enterprises adopt, manage and troubleshoot AI applications and workloads. The startup supports AI workloads across deep observability, network policy and traffic, end-to-end private connectivity and application-driven routing.

Pulumi

Top Executive: Joe Duffy, CEO

Pulumi’s intelligent cloud management platform helps organizations deliver faster on any cloud and in any programming language. The solution lets customers manage 10-times more cloud resources at lower cost than traditional tools, the company said, while its Pulumi Insights offering unlocks analytics and search across cloud infrastructure and allows AI-driven infrastructure automation.

The Seattle-based startup’s Cloud Framework is for building modern container and serverless cloud applications. Pulumi raised about $100 million in funding last year.

Spectro Cloud

Top Executive: Tenry Fu, CEO

Spectro Cloud enables customers to manage Kubernetes in production at scale with a platform that gives control of the full Kubernetes lifecycle across clouds, data centers and edge environments. The San Jose, Calif.-based startup is doubling down on AI with the launch of Palette EdgeAI that lets customers build, deploy and manage Kubernetes-based AI software stacks.

Spectro Cloud is a highly accredited AWS vendor partner with a strong relationship with the cloud giant.

Upbound

Top Executive: Bassam Tabbara, CEO

Seattle-based startup Upbound is looking to democratize the control plane by allowing engineers to get centralized control, governance and stability. The control plane company is behind the popular open source project Crossplane, enabling cloud engineers to create their own cloud native platform with infrastructure resource exposed as stable APIs for teams to use.

Upbound enables teams to scale to thousands of resources while getting centralized control of all cloud infrastructure including any cloud service provider and any cloud native tool.

Vultr

Top Executive: J.J. Kardwell, CEO

Vultr dubs itself the world’s largest privately held cloud computing platform by serving 1.5 million customers across 185 countries. Vultr offers a slew of cloud computing infrastructure and resources spanning from bare metal options to GPU compute available on demand.

Backed by parent company Constant, Vultr provides shared and dedicated CPU, block and object storage, Nvidia cloud GPUs, as well as networking and Kubernetes solutions. The company’s mission is to make high-performance cloud computing easier to use, affordable and locally accessible.

The West Palm Beach, Fla.-based startup is consistently expanding its data center footprint in order to offer its cloud infrastructure to more customers on a global basis. In May, Vultr Talon was launched to offer customers accelerating computing by enabling GPU sharing so multiple workloads can run on a single Nvidia GPU.

Weka

Top Executive: Liran Zvibel, CEO

The Weka Data Platform looks to set the standard for AI infrastructure with a cloud and AI-native architecture that provides seamless data portability across all cloud and on-premise environments. The Campbell, Calif.-based startup transforms stagnant data silos into dynamic data pipelines that help AI, machine learning and GPU workloads run more efficiently in the cloud, while providing data access from data centers and multi-cloud environments.

In May, Weka raised $140 million in a Series E funding round, bringing the startup’s total valuation to $1.6 billion.