PiCloud

Referral Source: Cold email to Marc A Founder Sketches: 2 '08 CS grads from Berkeley Basic idea: Enabling HPC customers today (have the vision to make this generally available to all cloud application) to access a cloud grid. They insert a few lines of python code (extending to Java soon) into the application code to fetch the relevant data and run queries on a grid sitting on top of AWS. Apparently (which was news to me), 25% of AWS's instances are in fact HPC today. The vision - which may sound familiar - is to ultimately offer Computing Power as a Utility Does the product exist: Yes - in beta Metrics: 1,700 beta users today Amount Raised: $35k grant from Lightspeed in Jan 09 Amount raising: $650k seed round Enthusiasm: 8 - very smart entrepreneurs with a very simple value prop today, but with a strong vision for how to make this a general purpose public or private cloud platform.