# Announcing our seed round
It’s been an amazing journey so far, and we’re just getting started. My name is [Tyson Kunovsky](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tkunovsky/), and today I'm pleased to announce that our team at [AutoCloud](https://www.autocloud.dev/) (the makers of [CloudGraph](https://www.cloudgraph.dev/)) has raised a $4M seed round led by [Animo Ventures](https://animo.vc), with participating checks from [Uncorrelated Ventures](https://uncorrelated.com/), [B Capital Group](https://www.bcapgroup.com/), [Moxxie Ventures](https://www.moxxie.vc/), and others.
You probably know AutoCloud as the GraphQL API and 3D insight platform for AWS, Azure, GCP, and K8s but I wanted to talk briefly about how AutoCloud came to be.
## How it started
Back in 2019 our CTO Chris Koning and myself were staffed as consultants on a challenging cloud migration project for one of the world’s largest companies. In a highly regulated, complex, legacy AWS environment we quickly needed to solve a host of problems including understanding:
- What existed in each region? **Asset Inventory**
- Who created each component of the system and why? **Audit/Changelog**
- Who/what had access to what? **Identity and Access Management**
- Were there any security & compliance violations based on various custom rulesets? **SecOps**
- Where were the major cost centers and could they be optimized? **FinOps/Billing**
- How well-architected were the various system components and were there any bottlenecks? **Ops/SRE**
Even as AWS experts, our options to get this information were extremely limited. We could either spend countless hours playing detective or pay for several different expensive tools that each provided us with slices of the overall information we needed and then synthesize the data ourselves.
We joked that it would be a great idea to just build a __single universal GraphQL API and reporting system for all clouds/SaaS service providers__ to do this for us so we could take the rest of the year off instead of working around the clock to figure all of this out.
It turned out that we were not alone in experiencing these pain points, nor were not unique to consulting, or even enterprise companies.
As we started talking to more and more engineers working on everything from personal projects to some of the world's largest systems, we realized that we as a cloud community desperately needed a better open-source way to understand our cloud environments. A few months later AutoCloud and CloudGraph were born.
## How it’s going
We have made tremendous progress in the last year when it comes to features and coverage for our open-source and SaaS platforms:
- [CloudGraph](https://www.cloudgraph.dev/) - the GraphQL API for AWS was launched and accumulated almost 550 stars in just one month!
- [CloudGraph Providers](https://github.com/cloudgraphdev/cloudgraph-provider-aws) - We’ve grown our CloudGraph provider coverage to include [AWS](https://github.com/cloudgraphdev/cloudgraph-provider-aws), [Azure](https://github.com/cloudgraphdev/cloudgraph-provider-azure), [GCP](https://github.com/cloudgraphdev/cloudgraph-provider-gcp), and are beginning work on K8s soon.
- [CloudGraph Policies](https://github.com/cloudgraphdev/cli): Full CIS benchmark suite for AWS with dozens of additional compliance standards coming soon. You can even write your own!
- [CloudGraph SDK](https://github.com/cloudgraphdev/sdk): Write your own provider for any cloud or SaaS provider easily.
- [AutoCloud](https://www.autocloud.dev/) is now out of closed beta and free to use for any developer. AutoCloud can provide instant up-to-date documentation on infrastructure systems for AWS, Azure, and GCP as well as deep insights on security, compliance, asset inventories, and drift detection. [Signup now for free here](https://app.autocloud.dev/signup).
## What’s coming in 2022
We want our community to dictate the direction of the open-source CloudGraph software which is why we are transparent about our feature roadmap.
We have big plans for 2022 including additional provider support, compliance frameworks, drift detection, pricing data support, and others. We’re excited to continue making AutoCloud and CloudGraph the world’s most comprehensive GraphQL API and reporting system for cloud and SasS data.
## Wrapping up
Check out our [TechCrunch exclusive](https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/22/autocloud-raises-4m-to-commercialize-its-oss-cloud-visualization-service/) for more information and drop me a message at tyson@autocloud.dev if you’re interested in chatting more about open source, security, or anything else. I’m always happy to talk :)
## About AutoCloud
For large organizations running workloads on AWS, Azure, and GCP, AutoCloud creates regular snapshots of your entire multi-environment or multi-cloud footprint so that cloud engineers and their managers can get instant reports on security, compliance, governance, and spend - not just now, but at any point in time - throughout the history of their environment's existence since AutoCloud was connected.
AutoCloud saves teams countless dollars/hours of time that would otherwise be spent on repetitive and laborious tasks so technical individuals can focus on delivering value to the business instead.
[Get started in under 5 minutes here](https://www.autocloud.dev/)