Today, technical decision-makers at companies, whether big or small, try to look for flexible ways to speed up application development and ensure long-term scalability for their engineering teams. Configuring solutions such as AWS requires a team of in-house experts, which is expensive and takes time to build. In fact, more than 77% of all tech companies run into DevOps challenges across the board, including cost, risks, security, optimization of the deployment pipeline, and scaling.

San Francisco-based Zeet, a platform that solves DevOps challenges and accelerates application deployment for startups, has raised $2 million in a seed round of funding led by venture capital firm Race Capital. The company plans to use the funding, which also saw participation from GGV Capital, Founders Inc, and multiple engineering leaders, to build out its teams across areas ranging from engineering to marketing and meet growing demand from customers.

Founded in 2020 by Johnny Dallas and Zihao Zhang, Zeet strives to tackle these bottlenecks through automation. The solution connects to a cloud account and automates traditionally manual DevOps tasks, allowing a team to quickly go from code to a scalable application.

Automated DevOps deployment

In order to use the platform, all a developer has to do is bring their code to the Zeet platform from a GitHub or Docker Hub repository. Once that is done, the solution analyzes the underlying source code and defines the elements required for processing, including which codebase to use for development. Then, it automatically builds the application without requiring the user to cobble together CI tools such as AWS CodeBuild, Jenkins, and Travis CI.

After this, the application can be transparently deployed across multiple clouds and configured for active monitoring using enterprise tools such as PagerDuty, Datadog, or Dynatrace.

“I want Zeet to be the ultimate DevOps and deployment platform. Our developers and companies use Zeet to deploy across any major cloud vendors including AWS and GCP. We make it super easy to configure your cloud provider — be it AWS or GCP or otherwise,” Dallas told VentureBeat.

“This is a new take on application deployment as our customers are able to have deep visibility into their infrastructure, trust their setup and deployment process, and maintain cloud costs, all with no technical restrictions imposed on them as to what kinds of applications they can deploy. With Zeet they get all of the benefits of an infrastructure tool, all while using their own existing cloud platform,” he added.

The solution, as Dallas explained, has already been adopted by over 17,000 developers and companies, with their team-focused product witnessing 50% month-over-month growth in revenue across the past six months. The cofounder didn’t disclose the exact revenue figures but confirmed that both startups and enterprise customers have been driving the growth.

Competitors

In the deployment tooling space, Zeet goes against players such as HashiCorp, Netlify, Render.com, and Heroku. However, Dallas claims its platform is different from typical PaaS providers because it allows customers to deploy into their own cloud provider.

“We don’t charge an exponentially increasing margin, we work to minimize our customers’ costs,” he said. “Plus, we don’t ask our customers to trust us with their reliability, we show them why their setup won’t break and arm them with tools to combat downtime. For example, with the recent AWS outages, all of Zeet’s customers were able to switch to another region (or cloud provider entirely) to avoid downtime.”

Globally, tech companies around the world continue to make huge investments in cloud operations and internal tooling. According to Gartner, spending on public cloud services is expected to grow 23.1% in 2021 to $332 billion, up from $270 billion in 2020. Meanwhile, the total spending across cloud application services is likely to touch $122 billion in 2021 and $145 billion by 2022.