How it all started

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We all have been privy and party to today’s global data explosion. Post COVID, all of our interactions, be it watching movies, our business interactions and even shopping for groceries have moved online. And this growth is just getting started. It is estimated that by 2030, globally, 612 zettabytes of data will be created. And the perspective of this really sets in when I realize that 1 zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 gigabytes.

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This data explosion has set in a number of chain key events around the world. The Cloud Storage space is one of the benefactors of this growth. AWS, Azure and GCP have revolutionized this space. Today, our photos, videos, movies, documents and even our personal information are being saved on the cloud. And businesses are no different. 

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In the last 3 years, enterprises have started moving aggressively to the cloud. Especially the group of enterprises I like to call “Cloud transients”. Enterprises born before 2005, who use matured on-prem data centers and are now migrating to the cloud. And the data supports it. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is seeing one of its largest growths ever. According to Gartner, the IaaS worldwide market grew 41.4% in 2021, to total $90.9 billion, up from $64.3 billion in 2020. Coupled with a bubbling semiconductor shortage, there is no longer enough ROI on setting up new on-prem data centers.  

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When Vatsal and I first met, our discussions were fueled by how rapid this growth has been. Today, 8 out of 10 organizations are resorting to a lift and shift approach, simply picking up data from their on-prem and moving it to the cloud. Enterprises are pushing to move to the cloud and become cloud-ready in trying to keep up with the data explosion. But the question that we both were asking ourselves was ”Is cloud storage ready to handle this explosion?”

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Vatsal and I first connected in 2020, both coming from different tracks of Engineering and Business Development, respectively. 

Vatsal came from a rich engineering background of working on cloud. He started his career as a software engineer at Microsoft Azure in 2014, and then continued in Swiggy till 2020 working closely in managing Swiggy’s cloud infrastructure. Having lived and breathed in the cloud industry for 8 years, he understood the robust skills and resources that go behind managing a cloud infrastructure. He realized that the cloud might not be the magic golden bullet to solve all the on-prem challenges. If it's not managed well, enterprises will still face the same challenges which they were facing before and struggle to realize the promised ROI. 

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We have had 100+ conversations with enterprises and the theme of the problems has always been the same. 

• Upto 70% Cloud storage is over-provisioned (wasted)  to ensure zero downtime. 
• However, during peak traffic, organizations still face storage outages 2-3 times in a year. 

These challenges are technically complex to solve while working on live workloads. Unfortunately, legacy customers are struggling to hire & retain devops who have expertise in multi-cloud environments. 

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AWS, Azure and other cloud providers have covered the industry with their horizontal solutions where they have 200+ services across compute, storage & other. But, their IaaS storage offerings aren’t mature enough when compared to their on-prem counterparts. On-prem vendors like Netapp, Dell have built innovative storage solutions to these problems, which current cloud block storage lacks. 

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We both clearly understood this gap, and the need of a cloud-first solution to close this gap. And this fueled our passion from day 1, as we partnered together to bring Lucidity to life.

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Announcing our Seed Round

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Today, a year and half into our journey, I’m thrilled to announce that we have raised a $5.3M seed round, led by AlphaWave Investments and equally supported by Beenext with participation from other investors like Blume, BoldCapital, NuVentures and Sparrow Capital.

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It’s a big day for us and we all are especially thankful to our investors for their confidence and continued support.

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With Lucidity, we are finally taking our first step towards our vision of “NoOps for cloud storage”. With our “Cloud-first architecture”, Lucidity aims to make cloud storage smarter & deliver the ‘ROI’ which CIO’s are chasing. 

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Our technological innovations are aimed towards bringing a paradigm shift in the cloud storage industry helping enterprises

• Reduce cloud storage costs by up to 70% 
• Ensure zero downtime during peak hours
• Deliver the value at a click of a button

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Lucidity gets onboarded in 15 minutes, delivers ROI in 1 hour & then ensures DevOps will never have to configure storage again. A true “NoOps experience” which we believe is the future. 

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What comes next

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Lucidity wants to bring a paradigm shift in the cloud storage industry, mirroring the technological depth and maturity as seen today in the on-prem industry.  With our technological innovations and a “cloud-first architecture”, we aim to make IaaS storage smarter and able to tap into cloud-native functionalities, like never before.

I couldn’t be more excited about the future we have ahead of us at Lucidity. Our journey is just getting started. Everyday, I see the value in what we’re building, bolstered by positive feedback from our customers and investors, alike. 

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