[Tech30] Meet the Bengaluru startup that’s helping enterprises optimise their cloud spends

Small enterprises and large organisations have one common goal amidst the pandemic: bringing down costs.

Enter Bengaluru-based Lightwing, which helps businesses save 90 percent on cloud computing costs via intelligent automation.

Founded in March 2018 by Ravitej Yadalam and Navaneeth KN, Lightwing says it can significantly help improve team and infrastructure efficiency by optimising the use of public clouds such as AWS, Azure, and DigitalOcean.

“There are many cloud spend monitoring and analytics products in the market today. But there isn't a single product or platform that provides real, tangible savings through CloudOps automation and resource management for the various ways in which businesses consume public clouds. That's where Lightwing's intelligent CloudOps automation comes in,” says Ravitej Yadalam, Co-founder and CEO of Lightwing.

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The cloud management startup has made it to YourStory’s Tech30 list for its intelligent CloudOps automation that can be achieved with a simple one-time setup, eliminating any manual intervention and ensuring that businesses do not need any change in the way developers work.

Ravitej, 33, previously co-founded startups such as Pennyful, a cashback and discount coupons website, and MediRupee, a free healthcare rewards programme. He has a BE degree in electronics and communication from RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru.

CTO and Co-founder Navaneeth, 37, holds an MCA degree from Bharathiar University, Tamil Nadu, and earlier worked in the computer software industry, including Alation, Sahaj Software Solutions, ThoughtWorks, and Wipro Limited.

How does Lightwing help?

Lightwing, which has grown to a team size of around 10 members, offers a range of products.

Lightwing Multi-Cloud Dashboard lets businesses link as many cloud provider accounts they need to a single Lightwing account and manage all of them from a unified dashboard.

“Once you create a Lightwing account and link your cloud account, you will see Lightwing’s new dashboard. This lets you see how instances are running across your cloud accounts, which regions they are running in, what type of instances you have, your total cloud spend savings over time across accounts, and more,” Ravitej says.

Lightwing AutoStopping gateways ensure that your cloud provider charges you (for your non-production workloads) only when you are actually using them, and never when they are idle. The third product, Lightwing ComputeGroups, allows companies to automatically use cloud excess capacity and significantly cut compute costs.

Lightwing Managed VMs are similar to ComputeGroups, but for a single VM (virtual machine). “This is a great option when your developers want to spin up a machine for any reason. It comes with full optimisation as an orchestrated spot instance, and also has full ‘statefulness’ support built in,” Ravitej adds.

The fifth product, Lightwing Policies provides automated cloud usage governance across the business’ cloud accounts, while Lightwing Schedules helps to set predefined day and time schedules to shut down or bring up instances across all your cloud accounts.

“Lightwing Schedules is still a great option that you can set up literally in a few minutes. Just filter which instances you want to schedule and set schedule rules to get started. Again, this is well suited for all your non-production workloads,” he says.

The present and the future

Lightwing has around six paying customers, including Wipro, Discover Dollar, and Zwayam among others, and 15 ongoing POCs with customers across India and the world. It also has several resellers/channel partners, including an alliance agreement with Wipro to co-sell to their global customers.

 It charges customers 20 percent of the monthly savings generated by its solutions. For example, if Lightwing saves a company $1,000 in a month, it pays a licence fee of $200 for that month.

The cloud management startup was a part of Techstars Bangalore Accelerator's 2020 programme, and raised its first round of funding from them. The company was also a part of NetApp Excellerator Cohort 5 and Founder Stack by Accel.

Lightwing currently supports AWS, Azure, and DigitalOcean and plans to support more public clouds in the near future. It competes with the likes of Spot.io (acquired. by NetApp) and ParkMyCloud (acquired by Turbonomic) among others.

According to IDC, the worldwide spending on public cloud services and infrastructure will more than double over the 2019-2023 forecast period, and will reach nearly $500 billion in 2023 from $229 billion in 2019.

 Lightwing aims to tap this market.

“We offer a fully automated cloud cost optimisation that provides 2x-3x higher savings than any other product in the market. It solves the massive problem of cloud waste - companies paying for cloud compute they do not actually use,” Ravitej says.

The startup is at present in the process of signing channel partners across various geographies, including the US, Australia, Italy, and Mexico.