Generative infrastructure-as-code startup AppCD Inc. said today it’s rebranding itself as StackGen after closing on a $12.3 million seed funding round.
The funding, which was led by Thomvest Ventures with participation from existing investors WestWave Capital, FireBolt and Secure Octane, will help StackGen to accelerate its product development plans and its go-to-market strategy in order to fuel its growth.
StackGen is looking to disrupt the infrastructure-as-code industry that has emerged to simplify the lives of cloud system engineers. IaC enables users to write scripts that can automate the configuration of cloud-based servers, eliminating the need to set things up manually – a time-consuming process that can involve adjusting hundreds of different settings.
However, StackGen believes that this requirement — writing scripts manually — is almost as burdensome as the original way of doing things, so it thinks there’s a lot of productivity to be gained by automating that work. Asif Awan, chief product officer at StackGen, told SiliconANGLE that it does this by generating the necessary infrastructure without the need for any scripts, simply by looking at each application’s codebase.
“Our platform generates infrastructure automatically based on your application code, without requiring any app source code changes,” he explained. “By default, StackGen’s infrastructure from code applies all the security, compliance and reliability standards required for your infrastructure.”
Awan explained that manual IaC involves the use of templates or requires human intervention to create the infrastructure for each application. This is a problem, he said, as it places a burden on developers, DevOps and security teams to understand all of the infrastructure standards required, as well as the intention behind each application.
“These teams are required to implement, audit and maintain the IaC,” he explained. “StackGen eliminates this burden by treating the application code as the source of truth, and auto-generating the IaC from that code. It allows teams to standardize, streamline and secure their cloud deployments without fuss.”
StackGen likes to call this process “generative infrastructure as code,” and that name implies that generative artificial intelligence plays a role, but Awan said that’s not the case, at least not yet. Rather, he explained that StackGen generates infrastructure based on static code analysis.
The company did consider the benefits of using generative AI to speed things up, but Awan said that its tests demonstrate that the technology is not reliable enough for infrastructure generation. “Teams cannot risk infrastructure hallucination,” as he puts it.
However, StackGen isn’t ruling out the use of generative AI in a future release of its platform, once it can fix these reliability issues.
“Large language models offer the potential to make IaC even easier for developers and they are part of StackGen’s future roadmap,” Awan said. “We believe generative AI, in conjunction with our IaC tools, can streamline deployment and ensure robust, scalable applications. We have also found some initial benefits to using prompt-based architecture design, and have a first pass at that in our product.”
Rebrand and executive hires
In a press release, StackGen co-founder and Chief Executive Sachin Aggarwal discussed the reasoning behind the company’s rebranding, saying that the new name is a better representation of the company’s commitment to revolutionizing IaC.
“The funding will enable us to meet the growing demand from enterprise customers as we continue to deliver on our vision for the future of infrastructure from code,” Aggarwal said. “Our new name encapsulates this vision and mission to provide seamless, full-stack infrastructure solutions that enhance the developer experience and enforce industry standards, while embracing generative AI.”
In addition to the funding and rebrand, StackGen revealed it’s expanding its executive leadership team with a trio of new faces, starting with Arshad Sayyad, who becomes the company’s first chief business officer. Sayyad brings a lot of expertise to the startup, having previously served as president of Fidelity Investments India and as managing director of Accenture Plc.
The other new faces are Danielle Cook, a former ambassador at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and Lauren Rother, who formerly worked at IaC leader HashiCorp Inc. They’re joining StackGen’s go-to-market team, and will be tasked with accelerating the growth of its nascent generative IaC platform, which launched in March.
Umesh Padval, managing director of StackGen’s new backer Thomvest Ventures, said he believes the startup can potentially help DevOps and security operations teams improve their productivity by up to ten-times. “Its strong team, its massive market opportunity and its differentiated and easy to use technology met the criterion of our thesis-driven investments,” he said.