Nuon Seed + Series-A Funding

Why Now?

Today, if you are a founder building an infrastructure, data or AI product and selling to other businesses, you have probably heard from your customers, “can you deploy this into my cloud account?”. Most of us have heard about on-premise software, and if you are a founder this might immediately draw up thoughts of complex enterprise sales cycles, custom software configurations and difficult to operate and manage environments. These challenges historically have made on-premise offerings something that were only offered once a company started selling upmarket into legacy enterprises.

In recent years on-premise has taken on a new definition — just about every company building or consuming software on the internet today leverages public cloud providers for most if not all of their software, data, network and AI operations. The cost of entry for creating your own corner of the internet has gone from racking servers to clicking a few buttons. More importantly we now have all of the same abstractions over the infrastructure we are using. As this has happened, more and more companies have started thinking about their data as the foundation of their businesses and with the advent of AI, even seed and series-a startups are demanding that they keep their data in their own cloud accounts.

Data sovereignty regulations have started to shift governance and data lineage requirements down market — even early stage companies have to meet both today and tomorrow’s sovereignty requirements. At the same time, AI infrastructure and specifically LLMs have emerged as the new interface for working with customer data — serving as a forcing function for keeping data within customer VPCs. Finally, as modern products become more deeply integrated and data-driven customers are requiring that you connect with (and use) their data/integrations where they are today, vs moving data around — it is now cheaper, safer and easier to move applications than it is to move data.

Just a few years ago it was a completely viable option to ignore customer requests for custom deployments and wait until post-PMF to offer customer environments. Today, that is no longer the case — how and where you deploy your software has become just as important as what the software does. The savviest companies get this and are thinking about their deployment strategy as not an enterprise unlock, but an entire business differentiator. These companies realize that by building software that natively runs in customer accounts, they can more deeply and securely integrate with customer data, LLMs and networks from day-1.

Building and offering a product that natively runs in customer cloud accounts is not for the faint of heart. A handful of companies leaned in and have proven out a new approach to building software, one that bucks the trend of SaaS and side steps the challenges of self-hosted/on-premise software as we historically know it. Companies like Retool, RedPanda, DataBricks evangelized an early approach where software was deployed into customer accounts, but managed remotely by vendors. More recently, companies like WarpStream have chosen to design and build from first principles to run in customer cloud accounts.

Introducing, BYOC

Together these companies have evangelized the Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) deployment model — the BYOC model is where software is deployed into a customer’s cloud account, but managed remotely by the vendor.

BYOC is the best of both worlds — it provides the SaaS experience with the benefits of self-hosted. The data and infrastructure stays with the customer while the vendor operates the application.

The proof is in the pudding, these companies have not only built incredible products, but long standing and durable businesses. Along the way they have presented the BYOC model as the future of all critical business software and infrastructure. Applications that are deployed as BYOC are faster, have a lower TCO and keep data localized with the customer, enabling a more sovereign model.

While not for the faint of heart, vendors who choose to offer BYOC are able to ultimately offer a single offering for their entire customer base. BYOC gives them the knobs to offer a one sized fits all offering for each customer, and seamlessly support complex customer configurations when needed. When done right, BYOC applications integrate more deeply with customer data, LLMs and are better for both parties.

When I first heard about BYOC, I had been dealing with the challenges of SaaS and self-hosted as a developer and founder for over a decade. I first hand dealt with the complexity of running someone else’s software in production, and on the developer side felt the challenges of running large scale SaaS products and trying to sell to enterprise customers.

Collectively, these companies have discovered and evangelized a new, and better way to design software that runs in customer accounts, called Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC). BYOC is a new approach where applications are deployed directly into a customer’s public cloud account and managed by the vendor who has limited access to the account. This model combines the best of SaaS and self-hosted and I immediately started asking why every company did not offer this, herein starting Nuon.

A BYOC-first future

Nuon was basically started by asking two questions:

1. BYOC is clearly the best way to deploy software used by other businesses, so why do more companies not offer it?
2. What would happen if every single business could offer BYOC?

As I dug in, it became very obvious why BYOC is hard — and the answer is because we live in a SaaS first world. Everything we know about software development and modern cloud was inherited from the early cloud users — all B2C applications such as Netflix, Google, Facebook and more. As an industry, we have a ton of tools that make building SaaS products great — but very few that enable us to take the user experience of SaaS and run it in customer’s accounts. We believe that if every company could offer BYOC, they would — and this would not only be the preferred mode for data, ai and infra products but the default.

For data, ai and infrastructure products, BYOC is not only the best way to deploy software, but increasingly we believe it will be the only way.

If every company could offer BYOC by default, what would change about how we build software? If the last 17 years of cloud have been dominated by SaaS, and enabling SaaS, why couldn’t the next 17 be dominated by BYOC. With the coming age of AI, we have exited a world where software is one sized fits all and now, more than ever software vendors need to integrate with and safely leverage customer data. At Nuon we believe that the coming age of BYOC + AI will be as disruptive to the software lifecycle as the cloud was, and everything from how we deploy, operate and build software will be much different in a BYOC first world. If today’s major cloud players were designed for building SaaS, what would a cloud designed for consuming BYOC software look like?

Our mission at Nuon is to enable BYOC for everyone. We believe that be enabling this model for everyone, we will not only make this the default for business software, but power a collective reset of cloud software and power the next 17 years of innovation.

Our platform

Using Nuon, any company can take their existing infrastructure-as-code (IAC), application code and containers and create BYOC-native applications. You can unlock new customers, upgrade existing customers and support complex configuration requirements.

Nuon enables you to monitor your application directly in customer accounts, debug when things go wrong and roll out updates (or rollback) just like you would with SaaS. You can integrate your app with customer LLMs, data and run directly in existing VPCS.

Nuon is developer first, and once you have your app configured with Nuon you can build BYOC directly into your signup flow and control plane.

Team and funding

We are a hybrid team of 10 based in San Francisco and across the US — our product currently powers a few dozen companies offering BYOC.

Today, we are announcing $16.5m between our Seed and Series-A led by M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Uncork Capital and Redpoint Ventures. Additional investors include Mantis VC, Essence VC, Deep Acre, Red Swan Alumni Ventures and amazing angels including Quinn Slack (Sourcegraph CEO), Michael Grinich (WorkOS CEO), Richie Artoul (Warpstream CEO), Pukar Hamal (Security Pal CEO) and Chris Riccomini (Materialized View).

I personally want to thank both our early team and investors for going on this journey with us. Without your conviction, hard work and support we would not have been able to reach this milestone.

Thank you to our customers

Finally, a huge thank you to our early customers for your trust, patience and belief in us to help you power BYOC.