Luminal Closes $10M Series B Round For Its Cloud Management Service

Luminal, a Maryland-based service that helps businesses manage their cloud deployments, today announced that is has secured a $10 million Series B round led by New Enterprise Associates. This brings the company’s total funding to $13.8 million. Previous investors include Core Capital Partners and Maryland Venture Fund, who also participated in this round. Luminal’s product will first be available on Amazon Web Services.

The idea behind the product is to give businesses an easier way to automate their cloud deployments by bringing “declarative control, operational efficiency, and intrinsic security to cloud computing.” That’s about as specific as the company’s description of itself gets, however. For the time being, the service remains in private beta.

With the help of this new funding round, Luminal plans to grow its team and expand its current beta customer base ahead of the full launch of its services. “We’re building solutions from first principles to tackle hard problems in computing, and the strong support we’ve received from NEA, Core Capital, Maryland Venture Fund, and our other investors helps make that possible,” said Josh Stella, founder and CEO of Luminal, in a statement today.

As Stella told me yesterday, he believes that “owning and operating cloud infrastructure is challenging on many levels.” It’s still hard to ensure that your instances are running the latest configurations, for example. “Even when you automate builds, use scripts to do deployment, and use CM tools to update your infrastructure, over time there is configuration drift and variable performance based on neighbors and other factors,” he said. “Also, keeping your network, security and storage configurations correct and known is a big challenge.”

Luminal comes in by automating all of those management aspects by using what Stella calls “ephemeral and immutable infrastructure patterns which has the effect of eliminating whole categories of challenges and mitigating others.”

As more businesses move their infrastructure to the cloud, the demand for this kind of management service is growing quickly. Luminal is obviously not the only company trying to tackle this problem. Companies like RightScale and Platform9 (which announced a $4.5 million funding round earlier this week), as well as large players like VMware and others offer similar services. At the same time, the large public cloud vendors are also improving their own cloud management services, and companies like CoreOS are starting to offer their own take on this, too.