Team: AppScale Systems | Origin: California | Participation: NSF I-Corps, 2013
AppScale Systems allows developers to migrate their apps between cloud systems without rewriting their code, saving them time and money. Companies can use the AppScale platform to deploy and scale games or software without being locked into a particular vendor, reducing both the costs and risks of cloud applications.
Developed in the Computer Science Department at University of California, Santa Barbara, AppScale is the culmination of NSF-funded research and engineering that began in the early 2000s. In 2004, Chandra Krintz, chief scientist at AppScale, received an NSF award to study automatic Linux customization and optimization. Krintz then won an NSF CAREER award in 2006 for vertically integrated virtualization, a system design technology for reducing the complexity of modern hardware, software systems, and applications. AppScale received an NSF SBIR Phase I award in 2014 for $180,000 and an NSF SBIR Phase II in 2015. In 2015, AppScale received $1M in angel funding from an undisclosed source.
“The NSF has been incredibly valuable to AppScale. We founded the company in 2013 with a couple of founders and a professor from the University of California, Santa Barbara. I-Corps was just a phenomenal program. It made us so smart about what we were doing and how we went about building our business. We got very smart about customer discovery and market validation and the value propositions, all of these things that sounds so esoteric but are so important when you’re building a business. The NSF really fills that void. Now, we have customers in production. Our product is now ready for market. We’re starting to see incremental and escalating sales growth. All of that was due to this early investment from the NSF.”
Woody Rollins, CEO of AppScale