Hi, everyone. Welcome to GrayMatter, the podcast from GrayLock, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I'm Heather Mack, head of editorial at GrayLock.
Today, we're bringing an update to our Castles in the Cloud project, which we launched last year to map the Cloud technology landscape and find opportunities for startups to compete with the big three-cloud providers of AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. We've compiled and analyzed data for 2021 in the beginning of 2022. These figures include the number of companies in the sector, the number of submarkets, and the amount of venture capital dollars invested in startups.
Today's episode is the audio version of our analysis of venture capital funding into cloud startups. GrayLock investors Jerry Chinn and Jason Rish wrote the essay, which you can find on the analysis section of the Castles in the Cloud project website at graylock.com/castles. Jason reads the essay.
You can find all GrayMatter content on the blog section of graylock.com and you can subscribe to GrayMatter podcasts on SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Diana Ramon the need for reliable tools that advance and protect the capabilities of cloud will continue to present opportunities for startups to thrive. The long-term trend of building cloud-native applications will continue to provide attractive startup opportunities for founders.
We've compiled and analyzed new data on the sector as part of our Castles in the Cloud project, mapping the activity in the venture capital-funded startup ecosystem with that of the big three cloud providers, AWS, Azure and GCP. Total VC funding into the entire cloud sector hit 50.3 billion among tracked companies up from 15.3 billion in 2020.
We discuss four markets drawing the most funding as well as one market edge we project to have more room to grow in the next section. These markets are security, AIML, management and governance, dev tools, edge. In context, the big three cloud providers have each expanded tremendously within the $212 billion market. AWS remains the market leader with a 33% share, followed by Microsoft Azure with 22% and Google with 10%. Individually, each company grew significantly with a 37% increase for AWS, 46% for Azure and 44% for GCP. Such growth rates are remarkable for a market of that size, demonstrating the cloud transition has not decelerated even as businesses move back to in-person operations.
Some analysts believe AWS could soon reasonably be considered a trillion dollar company if valued independently from the rest of Amazon. Taken together, we believe the tandem growth in private and public cloud companies demonstrate that there are still many opportunities for startups both competing with and collaborating with the major public companies in the sector.
Top markets. Per our most recent data set, these four markets received the most VC funding. We believe there will be significant opportunities for startups and these sub-sectors going forward.
One, security. Increasing attacks draw increasing investment. While the cloud provides amazing benefits, it can also present increased security risk. Not only is the potential surface area for tax larger, it is also outside the safety of controlled on-prem systems and thus often poorly understood by traditional security teams and vendors. The number of cyber attacks per week on corporate networks increased 50% in 2021 compared to 2020, peaking at an all-time high in December due to the high profile log4J vulnerability.
Investment in security companies mirrored this frenzy of activity. Security now has the second highest number of tracked unicorns 18 in our database, with new unicorns raising across areas from cripple, log analysis, axonious asset management, panther, sim, and big ID, data classification. As we noted last year, security had one of the biggest jumps between 2019 and 2020 in aggregate funding. That trend continued this year, only more so.
Security startups received $7.5 billion from VC investors in 2021 compared with $2.1 billion in 2020. Within security, the leading subcategories were $3.03 billion for threats detection and $2.05 billion for vulnerability management, including monster rounds by Whiz, $500 million raised, Orca, $700 million raised, and Lacework, $1.83 billion raised. Identity and access management, a related market to security, also saw an additional $1.3 billion in funding.
Security startup trends for 2022. Strong valuations will persist for security startups, even in rocky market conditions. The tailwinds behind security are such that both public and private companies remain strong in spite of today's economic volatility. Many public security companies have fared comparatively better than their software counterparts in the recent contraction of tech company multiples. For example, as of May 17, 2022, the NASDAQ tech 100 is down 29% year to date, while the NASDAQ CTA cybersecurity index is down about 50% less at down 20% year to date.
Cybersecurity is often viewed as less discretionary than other categories of software spend, regardless of market conditions. For private companies operating in security, we expect financing to remain healthy. We saw multiple security companies raise strong rounds at higher valuations before the recent downturn. Abnormal security, which was incubated at Greylock, just raised $210 million and is now valued at $4 billion.
Opportunity and specialization. Moreover, we expect opportunities for startups will abound. Generally speaking, the big cloud providers lack the security background and holistic view across a customer's entire environment to compete meaningfully in this area. While the big providers are taking steps to provide more options for customers, adding more security services than any other new services in 2021, these tools typically function in a supportive capacity for third party tools. This is where startups have the edge.
One of the biggest challenges we hear from CSOs is the sharp rise in the noise and identified security risks in vulnerabilities in a cloud environment. Combined with the shortage of qualified security professionals out there, security teams are overwhelmed and unable to correctly prioritize which ones to remediate first. Prioritization derived from business-specific context on which assets are most critical can help address this challenge, as can the rise of automation and security engineering. We believe there is significant opportunity for the small, hyper-focused teams at startups to solve this problem.
AIML. Customization and tying ML models to business value. As we wrote last year, the big three possess seemingly impenetrable modes, proprietary data sets combined with seamless interoperability and economies of scale. While these continue to be barriers, they have partially been offset by companies' need to customize AIML to their specific businesses and use cases. This has led AIML to become the category with the most unicorns in our database, 24, the second highest funding amount, 6.4 billion in 2021, and the most tracked companies, 51.
AIML. 定制化和将 ML 模型与业务价值相结合。正如我们去年所写的那样,大型企业拥有看似不可穿透的模式、专有数据集以及无缝互操作性和规模经济。尽管这些仍然是障碍,但它们已经部分被公司对 AIML 的特定业务和用例进行定制的需求所抵消。这使得 AIML 成为我们数据库中独角兽最多的类别,共有24家公司,2021年的募资金额也是第二高的,达64亿美元,并且追踪的公司最多,达到了51家。
Many of these unicorns are in core areas such as model development and training data. In this case, they are competing directly against the cloud providers end-to-end platforms like SageMaker, Azure ML, and Google AI platform. In model development, DataRobot has grown a large business by tying ML to business value and empowering technical analysts in addition to data scientists. Relative to the high number of tracked companies in the AIML category, other parts of ML ops have developed more slowly. This is because just a handful of companies opt to purchase a best-in-breed ML stack rather than building their own or purchasing an all-in-one platform. However, we anticipate more companies will be swayed by the sophistication and usability of emerging tools such as those offered by base 10.
The applied ML company, which recently launched with 20 million in series A funding led by Greylock, makes models easy to deploy by surrounding them with business logic and front-end UI, so businesses can quickly incorporate models into business critical processes, and the workflows of domain experts. Other companies like HuggingFace, which recently raised $100 million, and Wates and Viasis have developed engaged communities, which will ultimately compete against the big three clouds on quality of ML practitioners. Unicorns also continue to grow in domain-specific areas, while the cloud providers can provide off-the-shelf APIs, many companies struggle with their flexibility and customizability to adapt them to their own data and use cases.
Companies like Riscified and Fortur have built fraud detection algorithms and workflow and e-commerce, while InstaVase is a unicorn in document extraction with vertical solutions like M&E. Solutions like Medical Claims Processing and Lone Processing.
ML Trends in 2022. The rise of large language models. Startups developing NLP tools are also among the highest number of unicorns, five of any segment.
In the last decade, most of the acclaim and funding want to startups made possible by advances in vision technology, and autonomous vehicles and extra interpretation have dominated headlines.
Recently, however, the rise of large language models like Bird from Google and GPT-3 from OpenAI have driven increased funding and interest in NLP, and companies that can be generated from it. GitHub Copilot is a prominent example. According to GitHub's internal benchmarks, 30% of new code is being suggested by Copilot in some programming languages.
We're excited to see new vertical and horizontal businesses built on top of these large language models, which may be either developed by the company itself or built on top of providers like OpenAI. We're encouraged by the swift progress in the field we've seen in promising NLP startups like Adapt, which just landed 65 million in Series A funding and Anthropic, which recently announced its 580 million Series B.
Acceleration of startup activity. It is likely more difficult to compete with the cloud providers and ML hardware and compute, but some startups are competing in related areas given the explosion of costs associated with training and deploying large models. OctoML, building off of TBM and modular AI, building off of MLIR, are developing tools that leverage compilers and runtime to optimize deployment of hardware. Mosaic ML is applying best practices across training workflows, training algorithms, and hardware runtimes to dramatically cut training costs.
We see continued opportunity for startups to come in as third parties that can innovate down the ML infrastructure stack and move beyond the existing focus at the model data and application level.
Management and governance. Giving businesses control and accountability. Tools that enable companies to extend control over their cloud drew considerable investor interest last year. Funding into the category reached 3.4 billion in 2021, a threefold increase from 2020. Such tools are in line with a few trends we foresee increasing in 2022.
More sophisticated data management and protection. As the risk and actual occurrence of cyber attacks has risen, cyber insurance providers such as startup unicorns coalition and a bay have become mandatory tools for businesses. However, the market is hardening as the sheer volume of attacks has led to an increase in premiums due to unexpectedly high losses.
Ransomware attacks in particular are creating a spiral in which companies use their insurance policies to pay the hackers to recover their data, which increases the incentive for hackers in the first place. Companies like Rubric, Cohesity and VM help to mitigate this risk in the first place by providing backup and disaster recovery, making assets recoverable without paying and depending on the hackers.
勒索软件攻击特别是创造了一个恶性循环,公司为了恢复他们的数据,使用他们的保险政策来支付黑客,这增加了黑客攻击的动机。像 Rubric、Cohesity 和 VM 这样的公司能够在第一时间减轻此风险,他们提供备份和灾难恢复,使资产能够在不支付和依赖黑客情况下恢复。
Rising ESG expectations. ESG has become a board level priority in the enterprise over the past few years, given predictions around increased government regulation, pressure from large shareholders like BlackRock and consumer expectations. Enterprises are working to measure, analyze and offset carbon emissions data to meet net neutrality objectives and the cloud plays a significant role.
AWS Carbon Footprint Tool, GCP Carbon Footprint and Microsoft Emissions Impact Dashboard all help customers explore the environmental impact of their cloud usage. Salesforce and Microsoft have each also launched sustainability cloud products aimed at helping customers analyze emissions data across their entire organization and competing with independent companies like Watershed and Persephone. We believe this will continue to be an area of competition in 2022 both to serve these markets and to make cloud services as efficient as possible.
Cost Management. Cloud Cost Management was the number one ranked cloud initiative overall among responders to flex areas 2022 state of the cloud report. Respondents reported being an average of 12% over budget and self-estimating 32% of overall cloud spend was wasted. FinOps teams are increasingly working with engineers to create better predictability as cost becomes one of the three key components of cloud management along with performance and security.
成本管理。云成本管理是 flex areas 2022 云状态报告中应答者最高排名的云计划。应答者报告称,他们的预算超支平均为12%,总体云花费的32%被浪费。FinOps 团队越来越多地与工程师合作,以创建更好的可预测性,因为成本已成为云管理的三个关键组成部分之一,连同性能和安全性。
Our database lists eight predominantly early stage companies providing products to help customers estimate and control cloud costs by properly sizing deployments. We believe bridging the gap between finance and development is key to enabling engineers to make accurate and informed decisions in real time.
As companies see ballooning bills we expect to see this concept spread into other areas. Cribble provides the service and the observability stack by filtering and transforming logs in front of downstream products like Splunk. Several stealth companies we have seen are looking to apply a similar concept in analytical databases. Dev tools.
Extending engineering resources. 2021 was a banner year for the emergence of large DevOps players. As CircleCI, CloudBees, Harness and LaunchDarkly all become DevOps Unicorns while HashieCorp and GitLab went to public. 2021 saw customers adopt third party DevOps platforms and mass. CICD is traditionally an area where engineers have been very opinionated and prefer to rely on open source software in order to have complete control over their stack, both from a customization standpoint as well as a reliability standpoint. However, the cloud has driven companies to become comfortable with the idea of strafting away mission critical infrastructure, even in areas like their build pipeline. Given expensive engineering resources and the talent and crunch, many companies are also aiming to focus as much of their engineering talent as possible on building products instead of internal build processes. The convergence of these trends has created an opportunity for these DevOps companies to scale in an area that has been historically hard to monetize.
Dev tool trend for 2022. Bundling and unbundling. CircleCI, Harness and LaunchDarkly all started as different point solutions. CircleCI and continuous integration, Harness and continuous deployment, and LaunchDarkly and feature flagging. However, these and other DevOps companies have aimed to move up or down the stack to create an end to end solution. Many customers are increasingly open to adopting platforms in CICD to ensure strong interoperability and simplicity. On the flip side, we also see the opportunity to unbundle some other parts of Dev tools like GitHub as will be the subject of a future essay.
Edge. The next cloud frontier. One smaller market in which we expect to see significant growth and innovation is an edge computing. Edge computing consists of storage and compute on the edge and is a powerful enabler for some of the other cloud markets we track, such as gaming and IoT. Gaming as a whole recently became the largest media category, period, and the demand for instant response times is huge in cloud gaming. The rise of AI models deployed on the edge and devices like cameras is also driving demand for edge computing. Another form of edge computing takes place in the browser, where technology like WebAssembly, Wasm, are bringing impressive capabilities. Wasm allows compiled languages like C++ and Rust to be packaged into a binary and loaded into a browser. Companies like Figma have demonstrated the power of Wasm over the past few years by significantly cutting low times and latency in their browser-based applications. Leading companies like Shopify are also implementing Wasm outside of the browser, and CloudFlare is investing heavily in WebAssembly on CloudFlare workers. Despite the power of this technology, we have not seen an independent unicorn in the edge space yet. We predict that this will change in the next few years as companies are started that make Wasm easier to use and others continue to harness Wasm for applications.
2022 preview is a very important step to the development of the cloud. We have seen a very important step to the development of the cloud. We have seen a very important step to the development of the cloud. As data from Cardo shows a 25% decrease in average series A valuations and a 42% decrease in series C valuations. However, seed funding valuations remain strong, and the best companies of all stages will continue to grow as opportunity of bounds to compete against the Cloud Big 3 given the secular growth of the overall cloud market. COVID-19 and work from home accelerated the cloud transition, and while many consumer and commerce stocks buoyed by COVID-19 have seen recent declines, there are no signs of the enterprise cloud transition reverting or decelerating. Many stand out private cloud companies have the scale and predictability to go public and will do so once the public market settle. We remain optimistic and are continuing to invest aggressively in the best founders building in the cloud opportunities above.
That concludes this episode of Gray Matter. You can find this essay and all castles in the cloud related content at graylock.com slash castles. You can find all other gray matter content under the blog section of graylock.com, and you can subscribe to the podcast on SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Heather Mack. Thanks for listening.