Most software vendors put their software on a virtual machine and send it to their customers. That means that the customers are on the hook to hire system integrators and other IT personnel to keep that software running — making the entire process of installing and maintaining enterprise software difficult and often expensive.

Gravitational, a company that was part of our Summer 2015 class, launched to the public this week with an answer to this problem: Gravitational helps software companies remotely manage their applications on private infrastructure, making it unnecessary to hire additional people to run complex software on premise. Essentially, Gravitational turns every on-premise installation into a remotely managed service.

TechCrunch’s Ron Miller wrote a story about Gravitational this week:

“Without a solution like the one from Gravitational, companies would
have to maintain two sets of code, which is simply too costly for most
companies to pull off. That meant these companies were sometimes leaving
deals on the table from customers who wanted a delivery model they
couldn’t offer.

This wasn’t the founders’ first go with Y Combinator, Ev Kontsevoy, Gravitational’s founder told TechCrunch. His first company, Mailgun was a member of the YC Winter 2011 class. It raised $1.2 million, before it was acquired by Rackspace in 2012.

It was through his experience working at Rackspace for several years
after the acquisition that Kontsevoy began to see some
difficult problems facing companies hosting SaaS programs in the cloud,
which would eventually come together and lead him to launch
Gravitational.”

Read the whole story here.