Ubicloud, a startup with an open-source cloud platform powered by bare-metal hardware, has raised $16 million in seed funding to support its growth efforts.

TechCrunch reported today that the investment closed in January. It included contributions from Y Combinator, 500 Emerging Europe and multiple angel investors.

Ubicloud is led by former Microsoft Corp. executives Ozgun Erdogan, Umur Cubukcu and Daniel Farina. Erdogan and Cubukcu previously founded Citus Data Inc., the developer of a relational database based on the popular PostgreSQL platform. They joined Microsoft when the tech giant acquired Citus Data in 2019.

Ubicloud’s cloud platform provides access to foundational infrastructure resources such as virtual machines, block storage and network capacity. Built-in cybersecurity features enable customers to encrypt their information, as well as create access rules to regulate who can access what data and how.

The platform runs on bare-metal servers from Amazon Web Services Inc. and several other cloud providers. A bare-metal server is a machine used by only one organization, in this case Ubicloud, at any given time. In contrast, standard cloud instances typically run on infrastructure that is shared by multiple companies.

Another difference is that bare-metal servers often include less preinstalled software than standard instances. They frequently lack a hypervisor, which makes them more complicated to use in certain respects. But the absence of a hypervisor also makes it possible to access the underlying hardware more directly, which is conducive to tasks such as optimizing application performance.

Ubicloud provides its platform as a managed service. Additionally, it offers an open-source version that organizations can install on their own bare-metal infrastructure. Ubicloud says both editions are significantly more cost-efficient than traditional public cloud environments.

According to the company, its platform can run the popular PostgreSQL relational database three times more cost-efficiently than the competition. It promises similar savings for virtual machines. Egress traffic, or network traffic sent from Ubicloud to external infrastructure such as on-premises servers, costs 30 times less than on competing clouds.

The platform provides its core infrastructure features alongside a number of more specialized tools. There’s a built-in PostgreSQL service that automates the task of creating database backups. Ubicloud also offers a service for powering deployments of GitHub Actions, a product from Microsoft Corp.’s GitHub unit that can automate certain software development tasks.

The funding round announced today will enable Ubicloud to further expand its feature set. In particular, the company reportedly plans to extend its platform with the addition of a built-in Kubernetes service. The offering will make it easier for customers to run software container applications.

Photo: Ubicloud