Ajay Gulati spent many years at VMware working on virtualization technologies that powered a decade of efficiency gains in IT infrastructure. He distinguished his technical acumen with the largest number of patent filings of any employee in VMWare’s illustrious history. Kirin Bondapali gained significant computer architecture and data center infrastructure expertise at SUN Microsystems. Long-time friends from undergraduate school, Ajay and Kirin both saw the aggressive growth of public clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, but knew that many enterprise workloads would need to be run in private clouds to meet security, performance, and compliance requirements. They both wanted to make the benefits of private clouds available to any company, irrespective of size or in-house IT operations management expertise.

In 2015, they founded ZeroStack to bring “cloud-managed IT” infrastructure to the very cloud itself by building the world’s first cloud-managed OpenStack solution on-demand for private clouds. They pioneered the first two-tier cloud-managed private cloud architecture, and by doing so, enabled any customer to have ZeroStack create and manage all aspects of a private cloud on ther behalf.