Sam Weaver serves as Vice President of Product Management unqorkhe realized that the company needed a better way to manage its massive Kubernetes cluster network, which are groups of compute nodes. When Unqork couldn’t find anything on the shelf, it formed a team of 15 people to build Kubernetes management products. Despite the millions of dollars in fees, Weaver said the platform produced from this is OK.
“I was thinking about myself, there had to be a better way,” Weaver told TechCrunch. “I mean, what we built was enough, but it wasn’t completely complete, and it took us about two years to get the build done.”
Weaver (pictured right) sat on the idea until he met Michael Guarino, an engineer at a company including Amazon and Twitter, but still called it. When Weaver explained the problem to Guarino, he was surprised by his response: Guarino thought the problem was relatively simple to solve. Guarino then built a better system alone in a few weeks.
The platform becomes plural. The company’s platform integrates enterprise Kubernetes clusters into a dashboard to make it easier for enterprises to simplify operations, manage these clusters and deploy upgrades from a central location.
Weaver said complex AI can also provide advice on optimizing cluster efficiency or diagnosing scaling issues. Plural numbers are cloud and LLM agnosticism.
Weaver said hopeful plurals make time for developers because they don’t need to search for information or errors in their kubernetes clusters. He added that the company can help the team update in a few hours, not weeks.
“It reduces operational overhead by about 90%, which is what we see with users and customers,” Weaver said. “People are very excited about it because they are actually able to get the productivity done.”
Weaver said the timing of the solution was right. Over the past few years, enterprises have gone from managing a kubernetes cluster to multiple enterprises, which is an accelerated trend in the rise of AI.
“You have a lot of cattle around you and you can’t think of it as a single cluster anymore,” Weaver said. “So, so people have been adopting many open source tools from the ecosystem so far. There are 2,000 projects in the Kubernett ecosystem.”
The plural was founded in 2021 and soon launched the original version of its platform. According to Weaver, the company now works with several corporate clients, such as financial services and other regulated industries, although he refuses to disclose specific customer names or numbers.
The startup also recently raised $6 million seed rounds by major venture capital partners and participated from Capital One Ventures and Company Ventures. Weaver said the team set out to raise $3 million but eventually doubled its own round after seeing strong demand. The company hopes to use the money to deepen its product capabilities and ultimately explore areas outside of Kubernetes.
Plural is not a person who is solving the spread of Kubernetes clusters. Competitors include Loft labthe startup has raised $28.6 million in venture capital, Rancher’s LaboratoryThe startup raised $95 million and was then acquired by Suse in 2020 for $600 million.
Weaver believes that the biggest difference between plural numbers is its architecture. He mentioned the fact that plural numbers run on gitops models, whose products are self-entered by each customer, and that each Kubernetes cluster has its own AI proxy to run on it.
“Enterprises have basically complete control over how and where they deploy this stuff,” Weaver said. “There is no data sent. This is not a SaaS service. We are working hard, we focus on continuing to add to the Kubernetes management platform we have, and there is still a lot to do.”
