- As a spin-off from VSHosting, Czech startup Zerops raised a $500K pre-seed round from Presto Ventures and Gi21 Capital, and maintains a strategic partnership with Contabo Group.
- As a developer-first PaaS, Zerops offers a reliable and cost-effective platform for developing, deploying, and running applications of any size or complexity.
- The investment will enhance integration with popular frameworks and open-source software, expand documentation, improve onboarding, and prepare for global expansion.
In 2023, the cloud computing market has reached $270 billion in revenue, with around 20% year-on-year growth. Up to 73% of the market is captured by the big cloud players – such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud – while other computing solutions (traditional VPS / VDS / dedicated hosting and PaaS) account for approx. 21% of the market.
The modern PaaS market, with its developer-oriented approach, is experiencing significant growth as it strikes a desirable balance between the complexity of big cloud and the flexibility of traditional hosting.
Thus, Zerops aims to make the development process easier by incorporating best practices and offering guided paths, helping solo developers and small to medium-sized teams create applications confidently.
The product is designed with four main principles. It uses fine-grained resource configuration and auto-scaling to ensure applications have the right resources, avoiding waste and poor performance. Its custom infrastructure supports both high-traffic production and cost-effective non-production environments. The pricing model is straightforward and affordable, encouraging the use of multiple environments without extra fees.
Kubernetes-like capabilities and cost-effective auto-scaling
The platform handles the infrastructure for each project, providing capabilities similar to Kubernetes without the complexity. Its auto-scaling features ensure production environments always have the necessary resources, while non-production environments can mirror production setups cost-effectively. This helps avoid the common issue of applications only working on local machines.
“Zerops is the very definition of a ‘by developers for developers’ product. The core of our vision, as well as our guiding principle, is making developers’ lives easier. While staying humble, well aware of the behemoth of the cloud industry, we’re working hard to gain the trust of the early adopters from the developer community. And to make our vision come true, we’re expanding the Zerops team,” said Ales Rechtorik, Zerops’ CEO & co-founder.
The Zerops team leverages nearly two decades of managed services experience from VSHosting, Central Europe’s largest provider, and benefits from the global infrastructure support of Contabo Group, covering Europe, the US, Singapore, Japan, and India.
“For a while, developers have been leaving Heroku, the market leader in this segment, in favor of more innovative and flexible competitors – and thanks to Ales and Jan, more are now quickly switching to Zerops. Given the massive use of AI in programming, developers are now developing much faster and more efficiently. Naturally, they’re also looking for ways to easily acquire and set up the infrastructure for their projects to run on. At Presto, we like spin-offs. There’s a few in our portfolio already and so far, Zerops is the one that brings us the most joy with its velocity and user interest,” added Premysl Rubes, founder and managing partner at Presto Ventures.
“When Ales and Honza embraced the idea of Zerops, they quickly managed to find a gap in the market and create a complex infrastructure service that allows for a fast application deployment. Faster than creating a client account elsewhere, in some cases. Thanks to the integrated high availability, Zerops maintains the original idea of production operations reliability. At the same time, the platform offers unique vertical and horizontal scaling and maximum developer convenience. The proof? First paying clients from day one of launching Zerops,” noted Damir Spoljaric, founder at Gi21 Capital.
