Managing and securing today’s complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments can be a major challenge. As part of CRN’s Stellar Startups for 2026, here are five cloud technology startups, founded in 2020 or later, that solution providers should be aware of.
Managing In A Multi-Cloud World
IT environments now reach far beyond the data center, operating across extensive multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud networks. Businesses and organizations are running more of their applications and storing more of their data in cloud-based systems—including public and private clouds.
Managing and securing those environments has become a major task for IT: Applications need to be connected and integrated. Data needed for operational and analytical tasks may be dispersed across multiple silos. Just tracking what cloud services an organization is using—and paying for—can be a significant challenge.
To help overcome these headaches, a new generation of startups is building leading-edge products for deploying, connecting and managing cloud infrastructure systems and applications—and keeping cloud computing costs in check.
As part of CRN’s Stellar Startups for 2026, here are five cloud software startups, founded in 2020 or later, that solution providers should get to know. The following slides include lightly edited company and product descriptions provided by the startups.
ClickHouse
Founded: 2021
Headquarters: Portola Valley, Calif.
Top Executive: Aaron Katz, Co-Founder and CEO
ClickHouse is a popular open-source columnar database built for real-time analytics at scale. The company’s ClickHouse Cloud delivers sub-second queries on billions of rows with high concurrency, powering analytics, observability, and AI agent workloads for 4,000-plus customers, including Sony, Tesla, Lyft, Instacart, and Memorial Sloan Kettering.
ClickHouse Cloud is the managed service for the open-source database. It delivers sub-second queries at petabyte scale, serverless autoscaling, compute-storage separation, and BYOC deployment. Target markets include data teams building analytics, observability, and AI applications, from high-growth startups to global enterprises.
Website: https://clickhouse.com/
Komodor
Founded: 2020
Headquarters: Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel
Top Executive: Ben Ofiri, Co-Founder and CEO
Komodor develops a leading autonomous AI SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) platform for cloud-native applications. Service providers use Komodor to maximize uptime, reduce cloud costs, and simplify operations with AI-driven triage, automated remediation, and autonomous failure prevention and cost optimization.
The Komodor platform, powered by Klaudia AI, enables service providers to drive reliability for cloud-native applications. It provides incident detection, investigation, automated remediation, proactive prevention and cloud cost optimization.
Website: https://komodor.com/
Native
Founded: 2024
Headquarters: Bellevue, Wash.
Top Executive: Amit Megiddo, Co-Founder and CEO
Native provides its Cloud Security Control Plane for enterprises, turning controls across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and OCI into defenses that enforce secure-by-design architecture. Co-founded by Amit Megiddo, who built GuardDuty at AWS, Native has raised $42 million from General Catalyst, YL Ventures, and Ballistic Ventures, with Phil Venables on board.
Native Cloud Security Control Plane helps enterprise cloud security teams map active controls and enforcement gaps, translate security intent into provider-native controls, simulate rollout before deployment, and validate that the architecture is enforced as intended.
Website: https://native.security/
PointFive
Founded: 2023
Headquarters: New York
Top Executive: Alon Arvatz, Co-Founder and CEO
PointFive develops a cloud and AI efficiency management platform that turns waste-hunting into an operational discipline for midmarket and enterprise engineering and FinOps teams. Its DeepWaste engine finds hidden waste beyond right-sizing, then auto-generates fixes.
The DeepWaste engine ships 500-plus weekly detections across AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Snowflake, Databricks, and AI workloads; agentic remediation drafts engineering-grade fixes (PRs, 1-click, IDE/MCP). The system is agentless and deploys in minutes. Customers see savings of 15 to 30 percent.
Website: www.pointfive.co
Rootly
Founded: 2021
Headquarters: San Francisco, Calif.
Top Executive: JJ Tang, Co-Founder and CEO
Rootly provides an AI-native incident response and on-call platform that helps engineering and IT teams detect, coordinate, and resolve incidents faster. Built for modern enterprises, Rootly integrates with existing DevOps and ITSM tools, automating workflows and reducing downtime across cloud and hybrid environments.
The Rootly platform is built on Sack and Teams. Key features include automated incident workflows, AI-generated postmortems, dynamic on-call scheduling, escalation management, and status page automation. It targets mid-market to enterprise engineering, DevOps, and IT teams managing production reliability and uptime.
Website: Rootly.com
