FAQ Friday

Really excited to announce this, and when we started the company six years ago, we had a pretty audacious vision. We wanted to deliver for the enterprise, the kind of elastic cloud computing that the hyperscalers had built for themselves, but the enterprises couldn’t buy, and that was audacious because we knew it required us to deliver hardware and software together. We knew that the minimum thing we could build was rack-sized. We knew we had to do our own boards, our own switch, our own firmware, our own operating system, our own control plane to deliver those API endpoints to allow people to really get the advantages of cloud computing on-prem.

Honestly, when we started the company, we absolutely believed in the vision. But a part of me had an upset stomach, like, can we actually build this thing? When we were first raising money, you hear all sorts of objections and one of the objections that drove me a little bit batty is people would say, you know, we know you can build this.

And I would think to myself, are we not explaining what we’re building? because I’m not sure we can build this. We know you can build this, but we don’t think there’s a market there. I’m like, oh my God, no. You’ve got that exactly backwards. First of all, it’s really hard to go build, but we know that if we can build it, that a lot of people actually want it.

We did build it and two years ago we shipped it into the market for the first time. Really exciting. And now two years later, we’ve got a bunch of customers are like, "Hey, this is great. When can I buy a lot more of these?" Well, in order to do that, we’ve gotta go ramp manufacturing, we’ve gotta go scale customer support.

We’ve gotta go scale the company, and to go do that, we need to raise money. Fortunately we found investors in USIT that share our vision for what this company can be, what we can go deliver to many different industries who are desperate for cloud computing on-prem. So we were able to, all of our existing investors participated.

We are really lucky to have investors that believe in where we’re going. And deeply fortunate to have customers on the other side that are like, "Hey, we love what you’re doing. We’re huge fans of the company. We want to buy a lot more. But in order to do that, we need you guys to go raise a lot more money," which is what we’ve done.

Really excited to be here. If you haven’t checked out Oxide, check us out. Follow us on LinkedIn.