Managing and securing complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments poses a major challenge for IT organizations running applications and storing data across dispersed public and private clouds, crn.com reported.
Tracking cloud services, integrating applications, and controlling operational costs require specialized software platforms. As part of CRN’s Stellar Startups for 2026, five cloud technology startups founded in 2020 or later are targeting these exact multi-cloud infrastructure headaches.
ClickHouse, founded in 2021 and headquartered in Portola Valley, California, provides an open-source columnar database built for real-time analytics at scale. Led by co-founder and CEO Aaron Katz, the company’s ClickHouse Cloud delivers sub-second queries on billions of rows with high concurrency. The managed service features serverless autoscaling, compute-storage separation, and bring-your-cloud deployment for more than 4,000 customers, including Sony, Tesla, Lyft, Instacart, and Memorial Sloan Kettering.
Komodor operates in a different segment of cloud infrastructure. Founded in 2020 in Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel, and led by co-founder and CEO Ben Ofiri, the company develops an autonomous AI site reliability engineering platform for cloud-native applications. Powered by Klaudia AI, the Komodor platform enables service providers to handle incident detection, investigation, automated remediation, proactive prevention, and cloud cost optimization.
Native provides a cloud security control plane designed to turn controls across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure into defenses enforcing secure-by-design architecture. Co-founded in 2024 in Bellevue, Washington, by Amit Megiddo, who previously built GuardDuty at AWS, Native has raised $42 million from backers including General Catalyst, YL Ventures, and Ballistic Ventures, with Phil Venables involved.
PointFive approaches cloud efficiency from a financial perspective. Founded in 2023 in New York and led by co-founder and CEO Alon Arvatz, the company builds a cloud and AI efficiency management platform for midmarket and enterprise engineering teams. Its DeepWaste engine runs more than 500 weekly detections across AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Snowflake, Databricks, and AI workloads while offering agentic remediation to draft fixes.
Rootly completes the group of five startups, providing an AI-native incident response and on-call platform founded in 2021 and headquartered in San Francisco. Led by co-founder and CEO JJ Tang, Rootly integrates with existing DevOps and information technology service management tools. The platform features automated incident workflows, AI-generated postmortems, dynamic on-call scheduling, escalation management, and status page automation for engineering and IT teams.
