datafruit

What do they actually do

datafruit builds an AI DevOps agent that connects to your cloud accounts, GitHub, Kubernetes, and observability tools, learns your environment, and lets engineers request operational work in plain English. It emphasizes running "in your cloud," with native integrations for AWS, GCP, Azure, GitHub, and more, plus auditability of all changes and safety guardrails you can configure (site).

Teams interact with the product in two main ways today: automated infrastructure audits that periodically scan for cost optimizations, drift, and compliance issues; and a chat interface (web UI or Slack) to ask questions or delegate tasks like investigating spend anomalies, setting up temporary access, rotating secrets, or proposing changes to IaC via pull requests (Launch HN, YC company page).

Security and control are core to adoption: customers can scope what the agent can access, set read-only vs write permissions, require approvals for sensitive actions, and review auditable changes. The company highlights a bring‑your‑own‑cloud/on‑premise deployment option (Kubernetes/Helm) for regulated environments and is pursuing SOC 2, with the product currently installed directly in customers’ environments by the team as they build out self‑serve onboarding (site security/guardrails, docs, Launch HN: BYOC/on‑prem).

Who are their target customer(s)

• Platform or DevOps lead (50–500 employees) responsible for internal developer platform and/or cloud spend.: Routine ops (temporary access, preview envs, secret rotations) pull engineers off roadmap work and slow deployments; they want guardrails and measurable reduction in toil and cost.
• Engineering managers or full‑stack teams without a dedicated infra engineer who still deploy to cloud.: Time is lost wrestling with cloud/IaC config, diagnosing cost spikes, and manually creating preview environments due to limited infra expertise.
• Small platform/SRE teams on the incident on‑call rotation.: They need faster, automated triage for cost/performance regressions across cloud, IaC, and observability sources, and repeatable fixes instead of ad‑hoc firefighting.
• Security/compliance/IAM owners who must control and audit infra changes.: They require least‑privilege access, approvals, audit trails, and clear boundaries before allowing any automated system to propose or enact changes.
• Enterprise or regulated orgs requiring on‑prem/VPC deployments.: They need tooling that runs inside their environment, integrates with cloud accounts, meets compliance constraints, and still reduces ops toil without sending sensitive data to a vendor cloud.

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Founder‑led, hands‑on pilots with platform leads and YC/Launch HN inbound: connect cloud/GitHub in sandbox or read‑only, run 2–4 week pilots around one concrete pain (e.g., preview envs or a cost spike), prove ROI, and deliver a repeatable runbook (Launch HN).
• First 50: Standardize the pilot into a security‑safe package; do targeted outbound to platform/devops leads at 50–500‑person companies, run weekly workflow‑focused demos, and publish case studies/playbooks to shorten evaluations (site, YC page).
• First 100: Layer in self‑serve sandbox with documented guardrails, a channel program with cloud consultancies/SRE contractors for deployments, and a sales motion for regulated accounts (on‑prem/VPC pilots, SOC2/attestations, prescriptive pricing and success metrics) (Launch HN).

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

Top‑down, datafruit sits across DevOps/platform automation, IaC governance, and IDP-adjacent workflows, selling to mid‑market engineering orgs that run production on public cloud and need to cut ops toil and cloud waste.

Bottom-up calculation:

Assume ~25,000 globally addressable 50–500‑employee companies with active cloud infra and English‑language support, at a blended ASP of $40k/year for an agentic DevOps product. TAM ≈ 25,000 × $40k = ~$1.0B.

Assumptions:

• Roughly 80,000–120,000 global companies have 50–500 employees using public cloud; 20–35% are serviceable near‑term (tooling maturity, language, compliance), yielding ~25k targets.
• Annual contract value averages $40k for mid‑market platform/DevOps use (mix of smaller teams at ~$20–30k and larger at ~$60–80k).
• Buyer is typically a platform/DevOps lead; adoption limited to companies with existing IaC and cloud observability to unlock value early.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• env0: IaC automation and governance for Terraform/OpenTofu with preview environments, RBAC/approvals, TTLs/quotas, and cost controls—focused on orchestrating and governing IaC rather than agentic, ad‑hoc ops tasks (env0 docs, env0 blog on preview envs).
• Spacelift: Terraform/Tofu/Pulumi orchestration with policy‑as‑code and a self‑hosted option—strong on pipeline governance and compliance; not positioned as a cross‑source ops agent for things like cost triage or secret rotations by itself (policy docs, self‑hosted).
• Humanitec: An Internal Developer Platform orchestrator that enables developer self‑service and environment/resource management; overlaps on preview/staging flows but is an IDP layer rather than an AI ops agent (overview, features).
• Teleport: Privileged access management with short‑lived credentials, session recording, and audit; deployable self‑hosted or cloud. Direct overlap on temporary access and audit trails, but not a platform ops automation agent (audit/events, self‑hosting guides).
• Gitpod: Cloud IDE and ephemeral developer workspaces to speed up onboarding and previews; focuses on dev workspaces rather than automating platform operations across secrets, incidents, and cloud‑cost analysis (Gitpod product/docs).