Ridge raises $12 million Series A for flexible cloud architecture

Global cloud services provider Ridge announced on Tuesday that it has secured $12 million in a Series A led by Chartered Group. Gigi Levy-Weiss’ NFX led the Seed round and also participated in the latest round together with Mayfield, Slow Ventures, and Viola. Ridge raised $10 million in 2019 and CEO Mati Lerner told Calcalist that the recent funding, which was completed in August 2021, also included a significant investor from Asia.

“Many companies are looking to move into the public cloud world,” Lerner explained. “Most of them will do so by combining private and public clouds. Our technology is aimed at developers who are looking to work in different environments.”

Ridge was founded in 2018 by Mati Lerner, co-CEO, Nir Sheffi, co-CEO and CTO, and Jonathan Seelig, Executive Chairman, who co-founded Akamai, a pioneer in the CDN market. CDNs are critical to the way that modern content providers ensure speed and performance. The team was brought together by Gigi Levy-Weiss, seed investor and General Partner at NFX. The company currently employs around 40 people.

The Ridge cloud is built upon existing infrastructure in hundreds of data centers across the globe. Many of the world’s leading data centers have already partnered with Ridge, including T-Systems, NTT and INAP. Data centers can easily add Ridge’s public cloud services without needing the expertise to run the services themselves.

“We’ve learned that no single cloud architecture is enough for the applications we’re seeing today,” said Seelig. “Companies and developers need the flexibility to best serve their applications anywhere they need. Ridge gives them that freedom: Our cloud is scalable on demand, it doesn’t require any new CAPEX, and it’s easily included in any hybrid and multi-cloud architecture. It has the latitude to handle emerging location-dependent apps, such as the new wave of IoT applications.”

“Ridge is basically extending cloud services to locations where there is a gap in public cloud coverage, or to applications for which a public cloud is not a great fit; both of those scenarios are growing,” said Gigi Levy-Weiss. “Infrastructure used to be a constraint for any cloud deployment, but with Ridge that’s no longer true. Just like Airbnb opened up infinite new hotel supply without owning any real estate, Ridge opens infinite new cloud supply without owning any data centers.”