Techstars Alum Profile: Tutum
When I made an offer to Borja over Skype, he started jumping and yelling out loud. He then ran out the door, and the next thing I knew, him and his mother where both yelling into my Skype from Spain. It was kind of like being present during a UEFA soccer game - I loved their energy and enthusiasm.Several weeks prior, the first time when I talked to Borja and his co-founder Fernando, I was impressed with their energy and enthusiasm. But even more than that, I immediately knew how passionate and knowledgeable they are about the cloud computing space. I had a hunch that the two of them are on their way to create an important company.Tutum is working in a brand new, rapidly growing area of cloud computing called containers. The idea behind containers is simple. Just like physical containers drastically reduced time and cost to ship things, the software containers are fundamentally cheaper and a faster way to deploy applications in the cloud.Cloud infrastructure and hosting is a big market dominated by giants like Amazon and Rackspace, and a rapidly growing two year old DigitalOcean - a Techstars company based in New York. All of these current solutions provide users with a way to deploy and manage applications in the cloud.What makes Tutum different is that it leverages container technology to make deployment and orchestration of the apps really easy. As a developer, you can write code on your local computer and then run the exact same code in production. For decades, engineers had to deal with different configurations in development, QA, production, but with Tutum's solution they don't need to worry about it anymore.Borja and Fernando worked really hard during the recent Techstars NYC program to make progress on the product, to assemble a great team around them, and most importantly to prove that there is a real need and real customers for their product. The response from developers was very positive - they loved the ease of use and simplicity of Tutum.Because of their progress, hard work, passion and vision, after the Techstars Borja and his team secured 2.6MM seed round led by RTP Ventures with participation from Azure capital and prominent angel investors.And we at Techstars NYC are truly delighted to help create another strong cloud infrastructure company right here in NYC. Following the footsteps of MongoDB and DigitalOcean, Tutum will have its head quarters in NYC and part of the engineering team in Spain.Containers are a new, better and cheaper way to deploy and manage applications in the cloud and we believe that Tutum team is positioned to create one of the important companies in the space. We know they are off to a great start.
