Cross-cloud platform Hydra Host has closed a $10 million seed round led by Founders Fund. Other participants in the oversubscribed round include Sterling Road, 1517 Fund, Sovereign’s Capital, and Loup Ventures.
The startup provides secure and resilient hosting that is platform agnostic, meaning that it does not tie users into one particular cloud provider like AWS or Azure. Instead, users can deploy and host apps simultaneously across cloud providers, private data centers, or a mix of both.
Garrett Johnson, Hydra Host’s co-founder and COO, told Refresh Miami that this funding will be used to supercharge the company’s expansion. “We are going to grow revenue aggressively,” he said. “We are going to grow our team sufficiently to make sure that we have the right people in place to build a big company.”
Johnson, who just returned to Florida after spending a decade in the Bay Area building companies alongside co-founder and CEO Aaron Ginn, noted that Hydra Host’s limiting factor was having enough hands on deck to support their rapidly-increasing user base. The startup, which was established a year ago, currently has 20 employees. Johnson said that this fundraise will enable Hydra Host to double its engineering team, bringing their overall headcount to 30-35 by the end of 2022.
Hydra Host reports that over the last three quarters, their revenue has been growing upwards of 80% month over month. In that time, Hydra Host has gone from no revenue to $1.2 million ARR, with plans to achieve $1.5 million ARR by the end of this quarter.
Currently, the company has 25 companies from around the US. “We’re excited that there has been a lot of growth in crypto and web3, and that’s really driving our growth,” said Johnson.
Ariel Deschapell, co-founder and Chief Product Officer, explained that Hydra Host’s product particularly suits the needs of web3 companies. “Web3 companies are often targeted with different types of hacks and attacks, so the combination of uptime and security emphasis that we can provide has been very appealing to those types of companies more broadly.”
Deschapell is a Miami native who previously worked as an instructor at local coding school Ironhack. He asserted that, despite some growing pains, it has been great to have a front-row seat to the growth of Miami Tech.
“People used to call me crazy for staying in Miami and not moving to San Francisco or something,” he said. “But it ended up that the joke was on them. And they all just came here at the end of the day.”
Johnson is bullish on the tech ecosystem across the state. Governor Ron DeSantis recently appointed Johnson to the board of the Florida Opportunity Fund, a fund of funds with the ultimate goal of stimulating the growth of Florida companies and returning revenue for all Floridians. “I’m excited about what’s happening in Florida, about the various ways that people in Miami and throughout the state are really trying to make Florida the capital for innovation, and startup in the country.”
PHOTOS at top of post: Left, Ariel Deschapell, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Hydra Host, and, right, Garrett Johnson, a hydra Host co-founder and COO.
READ MORE ON REFRESH MIAMI:
- 8base secures $10.6M to accelerate the growth of its low-code platform
- MAVI revs up its in-car shopping experience with $1.775 million funding round
- She made Miami-Dade a Web 2.0 pioneer. Now Ana Chammas is spearheading Web3 GovTech innovation
- Upstream snaps up $12.5M Series A to upend the process for starting DAOs
