Distelli Snags $2.8M To Build Deployment As A Service

Distelli, a startup that wants to simplify code deployment on servers by offering it as a cloud service, announced $2.8M in Series A funding today.

Andreessen Horowitz led the round and general partner Scott Weiss (who founded IronPort) will join the Distelli Board of Directors as part of the deal. This is the first funding for the company, which has been bootstrapped to this point.

Distelli is Software as a Service that aims to simplify code deployment on servers, regardless of where it lives. It could be in the cloud on AWS, Rackspace or Google Compute Engine, in the data center, or as CEO and founder Rahul Singh joked, it could be on a server you bought at Costco and deployed under your desk. Distelli doesn’t care where it is.

The service works by deploying a small agent on each server involved in the deployment. Once the agent is running, you can monitor the server activity in the Distelli monitoring dashboard on any device.

Singh, who spent nine years at Amazon Web Services and was actually the fourth engineer hired, spent years deploying big code projects, so he knows the pain point he’s trying to solve first-hand. As he explained, there are good tools for writing and building code, but he says there is still a weak point when it comes to deploying. That’s what his company is trying to fix.

He acknowledges that Heroku is a good choice, as long as you are running a Heroku server. If you’re not, it forces your engineering talent to spend valuable development time creating deployment scripts using tools like Chef or Puppet. He believes this slows down the process and that’s where Distelli comes in.

Once you deploy the agent on your servers, you can launch your software as often as you like and it automates the process, leaving your software engineers to do what they do best — and that’s write good code. What’s more, because the agent is managing the process, if a server crashes, no matter where it’s deployed, Distelli simply restarts it automatically.

This keeps personnel out of the loop as much as possible, and lets software handle much of what has traditionally been done manually.

The company launched in March 2013, and it’s small right now with just six employees including Singh. He reports they have 15 paying customers. In fact, they have been so busy with their noses to the grindstone, that even though this funding round closed last fall, the company is just getting around to announcing it now.

Singh says, he wants to spend the next year building his customer base, and to that end Distelli will be deploying a tiered pricing plan shortly. Up until now they have charged on a per server basis, but starting soon they will be offering a free developer plan and paid plans for SMBs and enterprises.

He says the company’s long-term goal is to be a one-stop DevOps dashboard to manage infrastructure wherever it lives. For now, it’s concentrating on the code deployment aspect of that.

“We have been doing this for over a year now,” he told TechCrunch. “Every developer we talked to has expressed pain in this area. We’ve created a more efficient way to deploy code so engineers can concentrate on what they do best.”