Spectro Cloud

Spectro Cloud is a San Jose, California-based infrastructure software company whose Palette platform provides a single control plane for designing, deploying, governing and operating full-stack Kubernetes and AI environments. Palette uses declarative, reusable "cluster profiles" that define every layer of the stack — operating system, Kubernetes distribution, storage, networking, GPUs, models and applications — so that clusters can be provisioned consistently and kept in a defined state across public cloud, private data centers, bare metal, edge sites and air-gapped or disconnected environments. The platform covers day-0 build through day-2 operations, including zero-downtime rolling upgrades, OS patching, backup and restore, monitoring and logging, autoscaling, self-healing, multi-cluster observability, granular RBAC and quota controls, workspaces for multi-team environments, cost visibility down to namespace level, and full API access. Palette also supports both container and virtual-machine workloads, and offers Palette Virtual Clusters.

The product line includes Palette (full-stack infrastructure management), Palette VerteX for government and regulated industries, PaletteAI for AI workload deployment and management, and PaletteAI VerteX. Turnkey packages include the PaletteAI Inference Launchpad, aimed at routing developer inferencing to local models to reduce token spend, and the PaletteAI VM Launchpad / VM Liftoff Kit for migrating virtual machines off legacy VMware estates. Spectro Cloud also maintains open-source work, notably Kairos, a CNCF Sandbox project for building immutable edge OS images, including the Hadron lightweight Linux distribution, plus the PXK and PXK-E upstream-aligned Kubernetes distributions. Deployment is available as multi-tenant or dedicated SaaS, self-hosted, or fully air-gapped.

Use cases the company markets include building AI factories and GPU clusters, delivering AI-as-a-service with governed self-service access to models and GPUs, sovereign and regulated AI deployments, edge AI inference and edge fleet operations, Kubernetes fleet management, and VMware VM modernization. Target segments span enterprises, public sector organizations, neoclouds and sovereign cloud providers.

Founding story

Spectro Cloud was co-founded in 2019 by CEO Tenry Fu, CTO Saad Malik and VP of Engineering Gautam Joshi — the same team that previously founded multi-cloud management company CliQr, which Cisco acquired in 2016. The company describes starting in Tenry Fu's garage, with the founders viewing Kubernetes as a path toward distributed ubiquitous computing while identifying a nearer-term market gap in managing multiple clusters across multiple environments at scale, a problem they judged poorly served by legacy tools.

Business model

Spectro Cloud licenses its Palette and PaletteAI management software to enterprise platform engineering, IT operations and DevOps teams, with consumption options spanning multi-tenant SaaS, dedicated SaaS, self-hosted and fully air-gapped deployments. Service and support offerings accompany the platform, and specialized editions (Palette VerteX, PaletteAI VerteX) address government and regulated industries. The company reported triple-digit year-over-year annual recurring revenue growth for three consecutive years as of November 2024.

Software platform licensing/subscription across SaaS, self-hosted and air-gapped delivery, with associated service and support; annual recurring revenue is the metric the company discloses growth against.

Traction

As of November 2024 the company reported three consecutive years of triple-digit year-over-year ARR growth, with customers across technology, manufacturing, retail, oil and gas, healthcare, telecommunications, defense and intelligence. Publicly cited customer outcomes include T-Mobile achieving 10x clusters per operator and 168x faster provisioning, an enterprise migrating 24,000 VMs in nine months, a global restaurant chain rolling out edge 10x faster with $4 million in savings, and a classified AI factory stood up in 30 days. Team size is around 300, and total capital raised reached $260 million with the July 2026 Series D.

Latest developments

In July 2026 Spectro Cloud announced an oversubscribed Series D of more than $100 million led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives with strategic participation from AMD Ventures, Ericsson, LG Technology Ventures and Maximus, bringing total funding to $260 million and funding PaletteAI product development, international go-to-market expansion and ecosystem partnerships. The company is also promoting AMD Instinct Coder, a local-first inference appliance, alongside the PaletteAI Inference Launchpad and VM Launchpad turnkey offerings.