Indian startup Lucidity has secured a $21 million Series A funding round led by WestBridge Capital to tackle a significant issue in cloud data storage: wasted resources due to overprovisioning. The company's innovative software automates storage optimization on the cloud, helping enterprises reduce their cloud costs by up to 70%.

The problem of overprovisioning is widespread, with a Deloitte report citing public surveys that suggest up to 30% of cloud spending is wasted due to pay-as-you-go pricing, lack of visibility, overprovisioning, and unplanned costs. This inefficiency stems from enterprises' tendency to maintain a buffer for demand peaks, which comes at a substantial cost. In-house DevOps teams often focus on optimizing servers but neglect to optimize their storage, fearing accidental data loss or downtime.

Lucidity's solution, dubbed NoOps, is an application-agnostic layer that integrates seamlessly within existing apps and environments without requiring any code-level changes. This innovative approach allows enterprises to dynamically expand or shrink block storage volumes based on real-time data demands, ensuring optimal resource utilization.

The startup's founders, Vatsal Rastogi and Nitin Bhadauria, bring extensive experience in the SaaS space, having co-founded two startups previously. Lucidity currently offers two products: Storage Auto-Scaler, which dynamically optimizes block storage on cloud servers, and Storage Audit, a free tool that helps enterprises identify areas of inefficiency in their cloud storage.

Lucidity targets Fortune 2000 companies with over $1 billion in revenues in the U.S. and Europe, with 70% of its customers based in the U.S. and the remaining 30% in Europe. Notably, 20% of its customers are among the Fortune 100. The startup plans to expand its offerings to include optimization for object storage in the future.

The fresh funding will be allocated towards expanding Lucidity's go-to-market team and enhancing its products. The company has already raised $5.3 million in seed funding led by Alpha Wave in September 2022, bringing its total funding to around $32 million. With this investment, Lucidity aims to launch a new product within the next six months and introduce multiple modules to optimize cloud storage over time.

Lucidity's innovative approach has positioned it as a pioneer in the cloud storage optimization space, with no significant competitors in the market. As Bhadauria noted, "Our bigger competitor is the status quo; currently, customers are not solving this problem. They are aware of it but believe this is how cloud storage is managed."

With its automated storage optimization software, Lucidity is poised to make a significant impact on the cloud computing landscape, helping enterprises streamline their cloud costs and maximize resource utilization.