Cloud Storage Startup Lucidity Raises $5.3 Mn From AlphaWave, Beenext, Blume

Cloud storage orchestration platform Lucidity has raised $5.3 Mn in a seed funding round led by AlphaWave Investments. The round also saw participation from other marquee names such as Beenext, Blume Ventures, BoldCapital, NuVentures and Sparrow Capital. 

The startup will use the funding to fuel expansion plans and accelerate efforts towards its  international expansion.

“Since we are a deeptech company, there is a lot of investment that we need to do upfront in terms of product. Also, what we are building is time-consuming and we need time to be able to do so. A big focus on the funding round will be on scaling up our engineering team and to strengthen our go-to-market (GTM) strategy,” Lucidity cofounder Vatsal Rastogi told Inc42.

Chiming in, cofounder Nitin Bhadauria said that the startup plans to splurge on marketing, brand awareness and to scale up innovation. He further added that the startup intends to open an office in the US (New York) to better cater to its global clients and to target more high-value clients in the country. 

“Lucidity is building something that will have a very strong GTM fit in a market that is extremely large and global in nature. How Lucidity identifies and solidifies their problem statement alongside their clients gives us a lot of comfort in them”, said managing partner at BeeNext Dirk Van Quaquebeke.

Founded in 2021 by Rastogi and Bhadauria, Lucidity is an AI-enabled software for cloud storage which allows its clients to directly manage their cloud infrastructure in an economical and efficient manner. It allows its customers to automate cloud storage provisioning and reduces human intervention in the entire work-cycle. 

“We come in as an organisation that has built a completely autonomous solution which is able to solve all mismanagement of cloud infrastructure from costs to resource utilisation,” added Rastogi.

Explaining the process, Rastogi said that the company deploys an AI layer on top of the client’s cloud infrastructure and then, accordingly, rations the storage. He further added that the AI engine looks at certain metrics to forecast the usage and uses it to change the capacity of the system in a matter of seconds. 

The Beginnings

Graduating out of the same college, Bhadauria was Rastogi’s senior and a ‘serendipitous’ meeting in 2019 saw both discuss the possibility of founding a startup together. The duo sat down and began and started working out the intricacies of the project in the first few months of 2020.

Combining Rastogi’s previous experience in the field of cloud computing at Microsoft, Swiggy and Bhadauria’s sales experience at Tracxn, both cofounders hit the ground running on the startup. 

Bhadauria told Inc42 that it took them ten months of research to develop the product. He further added that the startup built a minimum viable product (MVP) and roped in experienced talent from the cloud industry. After much ado, the startup finally launched its product in March this year for selective enterprise customers. 

“We are currently working with a dozen companies, including many Fortune 500 companies. Our very first customer was a Fortune 500 company and currently, we are only working with big enterprise customers. We intend to release it to a wider audience in the next six months,” Bhadauria told Inc42.

Lucidity claims to have monetised its offerings from the very first day and charges a ‘management fee’ for every gigabyte (GB) of data it manages. 

In response to a query from Inc42, Bhadauria said that the startup was currently ‘very selective’ about customers it was working with, adding that its products would be opened to the larger public beginning next year.

The startup cofounders told this publication that Lucidity had no competitor currently. On being prodded about the ‘prospective competition’, Bhadauria said that the startup had the first mover advantage and was well placed to scale up in the event of competition from legacy players.

He further noted that the startup was fulfilling a gap in the market for ‘cloud first’ architecture which was missing in the current arena.

Lucidity can currently be deployed across three major cloud services, namely Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud Platform. 

The Indian SaaS market continues to witness manifold growth largely on account of pandemic-led growth. As people were locked in, more and more companies and startups went online and embraced SaaS products to increase efficiency and manage workflows. 

Last year, homegrown enterprisetech startups raised more than $3.2 Bn in investments. In comparison, enterprisetech startups have already raised more than $2.7 Bn in the first six months of the year. 

Besides, a SaaSBOOMi report adds that the Indian SaaS sector is well on its way to accruing revenues between $50 Bn and $70 Bn by 2030.