Render, Extend and Sotira are among CRN’s mid-year hottest cloud computing startups of 2025.
A language and framework agnostic cloud meant to compete with public cloud lock-in. A cloud that aims to revolutionize document processing. And a software-as-a-service platform for ditching extra inventory.
Render, Extend and Sotira are just some of the cloud computing startups to capture CRN’s attention so far in 2025.
While plenty of solution provider customers continue to deal with the spread of new artificial intelligence tools, the opportunity for scaling cloud computing with customers–let alone migrating more on-premises workloads to the cloud–continues to offer plenty of revenue opportunities to the channel.
That’s why CRN is taking its annual look at some of the cloud startups that are investing heavily in innovation and raising large funding rounds to meet continued cloud demand and take the industry to the next level, with the potential for some of these startups to invest more in the channel as they mature to scale their sales force and provide more support to customers.
[RELATED: AWS’ 10 Coolest New Products And Tools Of 2025 (So Far)]
2025 Cloud Computing Startups
For this list, CRN defines a startup as founded within seven years of the list date, eliminating companies such as Lambda and CloudZero that have raised eye-popping amounts of capital in 2025.
In March, International Data Corp. (IDC) reported that cloud infrastructure spending should grow 33.3 percent year over year in 2025. Shared cloud infrastructure should grow 25.7 percent year over year to $213.7 billion with dedicated cloud infrastructure growing 71.8 percent to $57.8 billion.
CRN reporters are publishing other lists highlighting advancement from this year, including the 10 hottest cybersecurity tools and products of 2025 (so far) and Amazon Web Services’ 10 coolest new products and tools of 2025 (so far).
Read on for some of the hottest cloud computing startups of 2025 so far.
Cerby
CEO: Bel Lepe
Headquarters: Alameda, Calif.
Cerby offers an identity automation platform for disconnected applications–cloud, on-premises and other apps that do not support common identity and security standards such as Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM).
The Alameda, Calif.-based startup revealed in May that it raised a $40 million Series B round of funding that included participation by Okta Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. Cerby plans to use the money to expand its app network to meet growing customer demand, iterate on its agentic AI capabilities and grow in North America and Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
CEO Bel Lepe co-founded Cerby in 2020, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously worked at Impira for about two years as head of product.
SkillCycle
CEO: Kristy McCann Flynn
Headquarters: New York
A software-as-a-service unified human performance and development platform that analyzes progress year-round, analyzes and addresses skills gaps and provides on-demand coaching is the promise of SkillCycle.
The New York-based startup has entered the artificial intelligence era with AI-powered analytics, personalized coaching.
A February regulatory filing by SkillCycle revealed that it had raised $2.55 million as part of a $4.75 million round of funding.
CEO Kristy McCann Flynn co-founded SkillCycle in 2019, according to her LinkedIn account. She previously worked at consulting firm RGP for about three years, leaving with the title of senior human resources and change management executive.
Sotira
CEO: Amrita Bhasin
Headquarters: San Francisco
Sotira brings users a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for brands, manufacturers and retailers to sell overstock and short-dated inventory into the off-price retail market.
In June, the San Francisco-based startup raised $2 million in a pre-seed round of funding to go after the $500 billion overstock procurement industry. The company leverages artificial intelligence and other cutting edge technology to sync and customize inventory lists for buyers, automate negotiations in email workflows and simplify purchasing paperwork, according to Sotira.
CEO Amrita Bhasin co-founded Sotira in 2023, according to her LinkedIn account.
Cyera
CEO: Yotam Segev
Headquarters: New York
Cyera aims to provide users with a way to protect and control data in the cloud, on premises and wherever else it resides as artificial intelligence takes off.
The New York-based startup leverages AI for high-precision and fast data classification, according to Cyera. It can also handle the petabytes of data growing enterprises produce.
In June, Cyera confirmed that it raised a $540 million Series E funding round and reached a $6 billion valuation.
CEO Yotam Segev co-founded the company in 2021, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously helped build and run the cloud security division for Unit 8200 of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).
Cyera has about 70 channel partners worldwide, according to CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs.
Together AI
CEO: Vipul Ved Prakash
Headquarters: San Francisco
Together AI’s cloud promises a way to run open-source models fine-tuned on company data without worrying about vendor lock-in.
The San Francisco-based startup runs on Nvidia graphics processing units and works with more than 200 generative AI (GenAI) models for chat, images, code and other use cases. It also has a partnership with Hypertec–No. 87 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500–to co-build a cluster of 36,000 Nvidia GPUs.
In February, Together AI revealed that it raised a $305 million Series B round of funding with investors including Kleiner Perkins, Salesforce Ventures, Nvidia and former Cisco CEO John Chambers. The startup is valued at $3.3 billion and plans to use the money toward expanding its AI Acceleration Cloud and deploying Nvidia Blackwell GPUs.
CEO Vipul Ved Prakash co-founded Together in 2022, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously co-founded Topsy in 2007 and served as CEO and chief technology officer of the company before it sold to Apple in 2013. He spent another five years with Apple, leaving as a senior director.
TensorWave
CEO: Darrick Horton
Headquarters: Las Vegas
TensorWave’s artificial intelligence and high-performance computing cloud is powered by thousands of Advanced Micro Devices graphics processing units to give users scalable, memory-optimized infrastructure for demanding AI workloads.
The Las Vegas-based startup says its cloud delivers consistent performance, high uptime and enterprise-grade security for accelerated AI model training, fast data storage and serverless inference for real-time AI responses, among other use cases, according to TensorWave. It supports more than 700,000 models, libraries and frameworks.
In May, the Las Vegas-based startup secured a $100 million Series A round of funding with investors including AMD Ventures. TensorWave revealed that it plans to close the year with a revenue run rate exceeding $100 million, up twentyfold year over year. The company will use the money toward hiring, ecosystem expansion and accelerated deployment of its Instinct MI325X-powered training cluster.
CEO Darrick Horton co-founded TensorWave in 2023, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously co-founded VMAccel in 2019 and held the titles of CEO and chief technology officer while at the AI infrastructure and edge platform.
Cast AI
CEO: Yuri Frayman
Headquarters: Miami
Lowered cloud costs, improved application performance and more developer operations efficiency are some of the benefits Cast AI touts for users of its automation platform.
The Miami-based startup automatically rightsizes Kubernetes workloads, scales clusters and redistributes workloads to maximize node use and prevent overprovisioning, according to Cast AI. Users can track cost allocation to central processing units (CPUs), memory, storage and other resources as well as automate AI model selection.
In May, Cast revealed that it closed a $108 million Series C round of funding that included SoftBank Vision Fund 2. It doubled its customer base between 2023 and 2024 to more than 2,100 organizations.
Innovations by the startup this year include fully integrating in-place pod resizing into its autonomous workload optimization engine and launching a database optimizer (DBO) to improve caching.
Yuri Frayman co-founded Cast AI in 2020, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously co-founded Cujo AI in 2015. Comcast bought the company in 2020.
Cast AI is part of CRN’s 2025 Partner Program Guide.
Render
CEO: Anurag Goel
Headquarters: San Francisco
Render started 2025 with two major reveals: the startup surpassed 2 million developers on its platform and finished an $80 million Series C round of financing.
The San Francisco-based startup bills itself as an improvement over legacy, simplistic cloud platforms that can’t scale and support users’ technical choices and an improvement over complex, costly public clouds.
The Render platform is language and framework agnostic, according to the vendor. It deploys in seconds, updates automatically, runs in a variety of managed environments and communicates across services that use any protocol.
After the funding round announcement in January, Render unrolled product improvements including workspaces compliant with federal health care regulations and single sign on (SSO) integration with Okta, Microsoft and other identity tool vendors.
CEO Anurag Goel co-founded Render in 2018, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously co-founded Crestle in 2016, which sold to Doc.ai about one year later. He also worked at Stripe for about five years, leaving as head of risk.
Chainguard
CEO: Dan Lorenc
Headquarters: Kirkland, Wash.
Chainguard’s open-source artifacts are meant to secure every layer of the software stack.
The company expanded its portfolio this year to offer guarded language libraries and purpose-built virtual machine (VM) images for hosting containers and optimized for cloud environments.
The Kirkland, Wash.-based startup raised a $356 million Series D round of funding in April from investors including Salesforce Ventures, Datadog Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. It now has more than 1,300 containers in its catalog and plans to exceed $100 million in revenue this year, according to Chainguard.
CEO Dan Lorenc co-founded Chainguard in 2021, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously worked at Google for about nine years, leaving as a software engineer.
Extend
CEO: Kushal Byatnal
Headquarters: New York
In June, Extend said it raised $17 million in seed and Series A funding to continue advancing its document processing cloud to prepare unstructured data for the AI era.
With backing from investors that include former Adobe Chief Strategy Officer Scott Belsky, the New York-based startup will use the money toward scaling engineering, research and development (R&D) and go-to-market (GTM) teams.
Its cloud handles tables, signatures, handwriting, images, PDFs and other document types with classification, extraction and splitting tools, evaluation features and fine-tuning pipelines that improve over time.
CEO Kushal Byatnal co-founded Extend in 2022, according to his LinkedIn. He previously co-founded Stir in 2020 and served as the startup’s chief technology officer. He also worked as a software engineer at Google for about a year.