AppCD is a startup that aims to make it easier for developers to set up infrastructure to run their applications by inferring what’s needed from their source code. The company on Tuesday announced that it has rebranded as StackGen and closed what is now a $12.3 million seed round (after first announcing a $6 million round in March).
There are plenty of infrastructure-as-code companies, where developers essentially write what the infrastructure should look like in one of their preferred programming languages, but the idea behind StackGen and similar projects is generally described as infrastructure-from-code. StackGen autogenerates the Terraform or Helm charts to set up the infrastructure after analyzing the source code, using what the company likes to call “golden standards” to ensure compliance with a wide variety of compliance standards like SOC2 and HIPAA.
In addition to the code, the service also visualizes what the new infrastructure will look like, and users can drag and drop additional resources in this interfaces as needed.
Currently, StackGen supports AWS and Azure, with support for Google Cloud coming in the future.
StackGen co-founder and CEO Sachin Aggarwal is no stranger to the startup game. Since launching his first company in the 1990s, he built (and sold) a number of companies that span the gamut from IT consulting to health management and cloud security. His last three companies were acquired by Qualys, Omega Healthcare and Tenable, respectively.
“Every time you build a business, you think maybe it’s your last one,” he told me. “I’ve probably been telling that to my wife since 2012, I guess. Then you take a year’s break and then you come across a new problem. I think what I really like is, once you have a creative mind and once you want to do something, you can’t really sit idle. Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur.”
StackGen is Aggarwal’s first company in the devtools space, but it was actually his last company, cloud-native security startup Accurics, that gave him the impetus for launching StackGen. There, he signed up companies like Nasdaq as his earliest clients, and while they were using infrastructure-as-code, a lot of their cloud security posture management (CSPM), which aims to detect and remediate cloud misconfiguration, wasn’t necessarily handled by the development teams themselves. Accurics shifted that to the left, but this also made Aggarwal wonder how development teams could potentially avoid many of the mistakes that CSPM tools then have to fix.
“We thought that declarative languages can actually be generated. And if I can solve that problem and my generative templates are built with security guardrails, I think I probably could solve a huge problem there where people are not spending cycles and ticket ops and everything to remediate, right? So that prompted me to say: OK, maybe I should shift further left.”
The team first talked to many executives to validate its idea and then hired the first engineer last August. Aggarwal also noted that Gartner now features infrastructure-from-code in its hype cycle report for platform engineering. And while I’m generally skeptical about those reports (and Aggarwal stressed that StackGen is not a Gartner customer), it is fair to say that this does validate the market, especially in the eyes of CTOs who base many of their decisions on Gartner’s analysis.
“StackGen addresses a critical pain point in the industry by enabling rapid application deployment without requiring developers to become infrastructure experts, and its sophisticated automation of infrastructure deployment, seamlessly integrating security, compliance, and operational standards into every process, is incredibly unique,” Umesh Pdval, managing director at StackGen leat investor Thomvest Ventures, said. “StackGen’s platform delivers up to 10x productivity gains for DevOps and SecOps, a compelling market opportunity, and early traction with their Dev Edition. The team’s ability to seamlessly embed security and compliance into cloud operations validated our investment.”
In addition to Thomvest, existing investors WestWave Capital, FireBolt and Secure Octane also participated in this round.