CIQ Closes $26 Million in Funding

know we we we we had a great vision in this but but it's important to note this vision didn't come from us just kind of you know uh just pulling this vision out of thin air right this vision came from living in this industry being part of this industry talking to customers peers collaborators colleagues meeting with people and that whole process really just drove this vision of what it is that we're creating and we've seen this vision start from kind of high performance computing and just take off from there and that's what's been so exciting is is not only being part of that not only

seeing that interacting with so many amazing people in the community but now being able to partner with um you know with funding partners that see this vision and they get what it is that we're doing and being able to all come together to solve this and and bring forth innovation capability uh stability uh democratization and support and um everything that organizations and people need in this industry so it's it's just super exciting yeah and very exciting talk about it and i'd add to that so and zayn this was the first conversation me and you ever had right so the first time we talked was about

man i'm frustrated because i can't solve problems and i can't do it fast first conversation i had with greg was hey greg i have this really cool problem you want to kind of help me kind of go solve that problem literally our first conversation we ever had so what i would say is that is it the ethos of what this is right marlin our you know original seed funder right same conversation hey i want to go solve problems and this is how i want to do it and the answer was yes right and our original investors the answer was yes now to bear the answer

is go solve those problems at scale and that's what we're going to go do that's exciting and like you said a big part of the reason that i'm here is to be a part of solving problems it's exciting and i think the the way that a lot of people have started to look at software is more of a i have an idea i'm going to solve a problem but i'm going to do it my way and i think it's exciting to be here where it is we have an idea we want to solve a problem but maybe there are other things that we should be

thinking about and being able to listen and collaborate with those other people is something that i don't see a lot of others actually doing they talk about it but i don't know if they actually do it and i think a lot of them miss the markets i'm excited to be here so kind of continuing down the path i know when we start talking about rocky this is going to be because of centos it's going to be an interesting topic and i want to understand how does this impact rocky and the rocky enterprise software foundation that's a great question so let me back up a little

bit and i'm going to first talk about kind of why we created what why rocky came to be why we were part of it and and what that's going to look like going forward so i kind of articulated you know just generally you know we were focused on infrastructure we initially set out to solve that infrastructure through high performance computing and you know we jokingly called it hvc 2.0 for a while um and i guess we still do it some to some extent but we were heads down solving that when when the announcement came that centos was going to be end of life now that

affected us it affected our peers people that were talking to customers and you know we felt as though it affected the entire community so how are we going to um you know move forward how are we going to deal with this kind of big shock to the system that pretty much everybody in enterprise has now felt and uh it became clear that you know due to past experience that i had with early days of centos that i could really help to uh to as we recreate this to guide this in such a way so we can uh navigate you know away from some of the

things and some of the well i i don't mean to be critical but some of the mistakes that were made early on with centos uh navigate through that and take the benefits all of the amazing things that centos was done right which was so many things and bring that back into this project and and rebuild that now a couple of things that we did different is the structure of the organization control of that organization and how are we going to ensure that rocky is available as a stable foundation for decades to come and the answer to this in lies in one simple kind of focus

point which is community and when we're talking about a community of uh a community a project for enterprise we're talking about a community of not only individuals but also enterprises and everybody coming together to solve and uh and work on that need together now again the organizational structure that we had to create around this has to be very resilient to any single company doing something negative or adverse to the rocky enterprise software foundation and we came up with a a a really cool model actually now when we first created rocky uh our first thoughts was honestly this was going to be a ciq project and

i've already had experience with bringing an open source project into a company and i saw what that did to the community firsthand it it it harms the community it's not good for the community uh when when all the decision making points all of the people in control of that project are under the umbrella of that company it needs to be completely distributed it needs to be everywhere everywhere and everybody being part of this and so we made a very important decision at that moment which has affected how we see everything in open source and how we relate that to communities and and commercial companies uh

which is and and the saying is kind of funny right if you know going back to if anyone you know uh remembers the old saying you know if you love something set it free right so that's kind of been our been our our model around open source if you love something if you if you really believe in a project you don't want to control it on your corporate umbrella you want that project to be completely free of corporate influence and you want to encourage everybody to come and be part of that even competitors you want everybody to be part of that project and that's the

model that we created with with rocky linux and then the rocky enterprise software foundation so ciq is a founding uh partner and sponsor of the rocky enterprise software foundation but ciq does not control own or hold hostage in any sort of way of rocky rocky is completely in the community everything from the entire infrastructure that we've built it the entire security paradigms all of the keys public private keys for signing for encryption secure boot shims the entire infrastructure is under the resf the engineers supporting it and making decisions about it are in the resf ciq's one goal and not to make this completely about rocky

but i feel as though some of this is really important i want to reiterate ciq's whole goal is to be here if anybody needs help and that's our model that's our business model that's what we're bringing forth is we're here if you need help and the community is there as well but i mean if you want if you want an insurance policy you want a throat to grab if you need and you need escalation help we are here and we want to be that and we want to help people succeed that's our model we're going to create additional value we're going to create additional services

and escalation for rocky linux so all of this is all is my way of saying that this is going to be nothing but amazing for the rocky enterprise software foundation and everybody using rocky linux because what this means is we are now able to put even more money even more resources and capabilities into rocky linux whether your community or whether you need help we are now here and we are putting more emphasis into rocky linux we are not changing anything with regards to how rocky linux is managed is burned and we're actually going to now help to define that with all of our uh contributors

all of our developers our team leads and also looking at our partners and sponsors so if you haven't seen the rocky enterprise linux uh software um sponsors and and partner list you should take a look at it i mean the the model was we want everybody everybody being part of that community and we've been really successful so far and that's still growing so that's our goal this is nothing going this is going to be nothing but amazing for the rocky enterprise software foundation rocky linux and all of those users in that entire community and so nothing's changing on that front except for more awesomeness very

nice and i think it's important to point out that the stuff that was done with centos was out of necessity it was small because things didn't exist the way they do today it's easier to have a larger shared community i mean the internet's come a long way in 20 years so being able to collaborate have more people be involved be able to get resources to do builds it's just something that wasn't quite available the way it is today so it's exciting to see how open things have become and how people can contribute to it in a meaningful way that maybe wasn't available as a part

of a lesson learned from sent up so that's really yeah that's a really important point saying um you know the the culture of early centos was was shaped that way uh i mean the goal was always community but you know it was very hard to extend the circle of trust when we're talking about things like private keys with the community at large um so we we had to kind of keep it small early on and but that created a culture of centos that um was it was difficult to break out of and part of that it made it very uh easy for a single organization

to acquire centos simply by hiring a small number of people uh so we are creating an organization and and again not to make this about resf but just to demonstrate resf is a whole series of checks and balances within that organization so there's no way that this could be ever that any or single organization can have a negative effect on that series of checks and balances what this creates is more value and it's more value to the community first and foremost yeah that's fantastic so kind of stepping away from the the rocky conversation and looking at the rest of ciq as a part of this

funding what what can we expect to see over this next six nine 12 months coming out of this because of the race robert you want to take that one yeah absolutely so just to take what sane and greg said one further on the open source aspects obviously we're involved in more than just the rocky community we're involved in the apptiner formerly singularity community we're involved in the werewolf community obviously we have a next generation compute platform that we're going to bring out to the general public here very rapidly so there's multiple different investments that we're making to secure stabilize and make it easier for people

to get involved in every single one of these open source projects so we want to tie them together the solutions to you know form a solution whether it's traditional hpc whether it's a next generation hpc stack whether it's infrastructure 2.0 so we have a large plans and we're able to now execute on those plans at scale and to bring forth our vision of tying this together in a meaningful way so it's it's just getting accelerated and our next three six nine months you're going to see a lot of multiple different offerings that are productized from us coming to market that just enhances each one of

these communities enhances what people can do with each one of those different communities i want to i want to add to that a little bit you know robert concluded that piece on communities that is such a big piece of how we see the world open source is is just critical to the success of almost every organization at this point and it is so critical that open source is something that can be relied upon it can be leveraged and it can be enhanced and developed upon and that is one of the absolute core reasons why a huge chunk of this investment is going to be going

back into that open source community back into those tools back into that foundation that we leverage our customers leverage the community leverages and that's us doing our part to be part of that and and to support that so uh you will see us making additional hires you're going to see us making growth a considerable amount of growth and really focusing on the stability of these open source projects and putting more resources into these open source projects uh not again not for the sake of owning or controlling for the sake of making sure that the entire community has this stable foundation and again our models if

you need any help we're here to help give us a call let us prove it to you yeah i have one thing sorry because this is actually really important to understand in my mind too so this is an investment from teams of investors that believe in us and what we're doing but every time somebody does business with us the exact same thing happens so what greg just described isn't just an investor investing in us it's every time somebody does business with us we do the exact same thing so just remember that our ethos doesn't change because an investor gave us money it is the exact

same model as a customer investing in us and using us as their escalation points using us to solve a problem using us to enable um and empower what they're doing so that's what we're doing so just by doing business with us the exact same thing greg just said is going to be reiterated over and over again i think seeing the model that we have is different than most other software companies out there in terms of the way that they support software and we support people it's something that's bringing more and more customers in and as those customers come in obviously we need to scale so

that's becoming important as well which kind of goes back to greg's earlier point of we are growing and i want to make sure that we tell everybody like where are we growing what types of people are we looking for and how how is that going oh it is across the spectrum right now uh we are looking to scale up the company pretty much on every aspect of the company so we are looking for linux developers we're looking for sres we're looking for golang developers solutions architects sales i.t management oh my goodness the ev the entire entire spectrum of the organization and in terms of projects

that we're working on uh we're working obviously if if people are interested in joining in any of those sorts of areas and they're interested in things like rocky linux what are we doing there in the enterprise linux space what are we doing with containers via app tainer and singularity what are we doing with operating system provisioning and imaging and and people are interested in being part of that absolutely we are we are growing and we are um so looking forward to speaking with people that are really passionate about these areas and there's even more right as we're looking forward we're starting off kind of in

the hpc space and figuring out how do we take compute that same compute model that has been leveraged for the last you know near 30 years how do we take that model modernize it and and continue to grow it uh stabilize it jokingly as i said we call it hbc 2.0 but how do we take that model now and start applying that to cloud how do we take that apply it to enterprise hyperscalers and and and how do we continuously grow and innovate that in that entire infrastructure an entire global infrastructure and that's really what we are so passionate about is building that infrastructure creating

that next generation of infrastructure infrastructure 2.0 well that sounds so cliche the second conversation mean you had was what hey when you come here i want your opinion i want you to set strategy i want you to tell us what the customer is saying over and over again so what greg just said every one of our engineers we have a very flat organization if you want a place where your ideas are going to be heard and you're part of the strategy that's the type of people we're looking for so you know if if that's the type of environment you're looking for we're looking for those

types of folks oh my goodness i'm going to actually i'm going to take this one step one step even further which is what kind of problems are we solving for the community now coming out of high performance computing this has always been an extraordinarily interesting question half the time when i'm meeting with other people in hpc i'm meeting you know asking questions and understanding their research understanding their science and i mean the the types of scientific problems and research problems that we have actually supported helped to solve and help to accelerate is massive our customers include and and people using our projects include everything from

medical science people looking to cure diseases people looking to solve real problems that affect everybody in the world going all the way through you know cutting cutting-edge technology aerospace uh you know sending things into sending software into outer space right i mean this whole thing everything that we're doing is about solving not only very technically challenging problems but extraordinarily rewarding problems and this is this has been our not only our ethos but our entire goal in terms of why are we doing this and you know a lot of organizations just talk about this you know and they just they put something out there i'm gonna

say you know this is such a guiding principle for us it is such a it is so so critical and so core to our culture that we are helping people we are empowering people such that they can go off and they can do the most amazing things that you can imagine that's what we're doing and we are looking for people to to join us that share that vision and that enthusiasm yeah i would tell you too it's not going to stop at these open source solutions as well so i know we already contribute to other open source solutions that people probably aren't aware of and

other investments and growth that we're going to invest in is going to expand upon that even further so the reality is this doesn't end with what we're talking about we're going to grow and continuously add capabilities to the communities and people that we serve so this doesn't stop with just where we're at today it's exciting and i've also been very excited to bring in some interesting not necessarily what we would think of as a traditional use case for what we're doing but actually bringing use cases that that are just interesting and they look at our product to see that it solves a problem for them

and it's maybe not what we were thinking about to begin with and kind of to see how that's gone and just the excitement behind us working with other people to solve real world problems it's been fun let's see we have a question from justin is how do i apply uh so one easiest place to go is to see iq.co there is a careers page on there we will actually add that at the bottom here a little bit and find what interests you uh go ahead and send in your resume and let us talk to you and see where you would fit and what you're interested

in doing that's a great thing about being here as well as obviously we're still small and growing so having like robert said a voice into what we're doing and being able to share experiences and ideas and knowledge is something that we really look forward to and welcome so it's not a not a silent off thing i'm gonna add to that too um you know even if you're at a place where you love to be and you're not looking to move join our communities and they're not i even said that wrong it's not our communities join the communities be part of open source be part of

these things that are you know passionate to to us passionate to other people and uh and just join and just be part of it i think what you'll find is there are so many like-minded people that are so excited to actually help others and uh and and really just be part of this this this movement of of people helping each other through software and and giving that back to the world it really is an amazing thing i've been i've been playing and and being part of open source since the mid to late 90s about 96 97 and um yeah i'm i'm that old and it's

been it's been a remarkable journey to watch not only um how communities and open source has now changed how we think about software how we think about anything with regards actually software development building things and how that community has so massively influenced everything we're doing in the commercial space in the enterprise space in the computing space federal and academia it really is amazing and the open source community has now matured to such a point in which it's it's really it's it's a joy to be part of so i would encourage everybody join open source be part of open source if you want to get paid

for working on open source projects look us up yeah that's something i think that most people or not most people a lot of people that i run across the enterprise are excited about open source they aren't necessarily developers at a level where they're writing middleware or whatever that piece is so they think that there's no way for them to get involved and i think it's important to know that there are far more ways to get involved than just writing code i mean being able to just identify bugs is important being able to write documentation is important being a tester is important and being able to

give back in that way so i mean like greg said joining a community and helping there are a lot of different roles out there that you can contribute back from yeah absolutely um you know there's the the funding marks a really interesting pivot point for for us as an organization as we're kind of graduating now from early stage startup to uh a much more mature company at this point and in doing so it's it's been it's been amazing to watch the transformation kind of occurring right before our eyes and um and it's it's remarkable if if anybody watching this has not had the opportunity to

to see this sort of thing in action and to be part of a a small organization a small community that's actually funded to go and do amazing things it's fun it is a lot of fun i spent a long time in in uh department of energy and federal space and academia and uh this this is like that while holding down the fast forward key and and moving as quickly as we can and um and really making an impact and making a difference on the world and seeing that one of the coolest things that that i love to see and i've been lucky and very fortunate

to be part of various open source projects but one of the things that i've seen that is just so amazing and and i love this is when i start looking at resumes that are coming in and other job descriptions and i start to see the project names that i've been lucky enough and fortunate enough to be part of starting to show up like just in normal conversation and uh seeing other people presenting and then and then showing that these tools and these capabilities were beneficial to them uh as part of their research and part of their growth so a lot of really cool aspects about

being part of a young organization and a startup organization so again we are looking for people in the industry that are just amazing and that want to be part of something like this want to help other people want to be part of open source this funding gives us that ability to now scale up massively so now's the time to join if you're interested so greg i know i run across people who have made the change from writing enterprise code that is in some way proprietary for lack of a better term proprietary software that maybe it gets sold maybe it's in-house and then they move into

an open source world and it changes their view of how software gets written what experience have you seen from that perspective i've definitely experienced the same sort of comments from people that have come from commercial industry and even federal space where they can't open source things if they're working under some level of clearance or controls so it is it is very free and and that's the way i would describe it um you know there's there's there's always you know there's there's some pros and cons of course uh just like anything uh but the the pros are so massive in comparison to those cons and being

able to leverage that and be part of that um you know i we we talked a little bit about the mantra of you know if you love something set it free and um and i've consulted for a number of of companies at this point about their open source uh model and how are they approaching open source and i i like to use this this analogy which is maybe not analogy but this way of describing it which is uh you if you're not ready for your competitors for other organizations to actually be more successful with your open source project than you are then you're not ready

to open source it don't open source it there's nothing wrong with keeping something commercial keeping something closed source and there's lots of really good reasons why an organization would want to do that but if you are ready for that that grand leap and you're ready to open source it and you're ready to to do that then you should do it in such a way that doesn't hold it hostage you should do it in such a way that is completely open and allow the community to develop because that community will drive something we talk a lot about in startups is product market fit that community will

drive that product market fit it will go where the need is if you support it and if you don't hold it hostage and there's a lot of value in being part of open source but i want to be clear not everything has to be open source so at some point we are going to release open source what we're working on in terms of the software side of infrastructure 2.0 fuzzball that will be released open source at some point in the future we're not ready to open source it yet and when we do we're already looking forward to that to that moment and we're looking forward

to being able to leverage that infrastructure such that as that continues to help other people and continues to grow the more value that it creates for people is all the more reason why open sourcing it will become more and more important over time hopefully all that makes sense oh absolutely i've had several friends that have i mean if they are working on enterprise software they will get involved in open source project maybe because it's running their software and they will spend more time at home at night writing and fixing things that they wanted to do or things that they think that it should do and

then it becomes an addiction and they start looking for somewhere else to write code so it's it's always exciting it's interesting to see that transition of people get the freedom to work on things they want to work on that they find interesting far more than i have to go write this thing today so the only thing i'd added that is sometimes i i don't you know bring it down to this level if you take it up even one more level i just like to solve big problems with cool people yeah at the end of the day like it's that simple like it is fun to

go do something complex and see it work if it's open source if it's enterprise just don't care like we are going after big problems and we're going to continuously expand that and solve them that's great so justin had another question uh asking what are we going to do with the funding a little more of a direct question this question this question is great um we actually get it quite often so we've done a lot of media interviews over the past couple weeks now every single media is asking this question every single author and and person develop writing content is asking this question it's so it's

a really good question what are we going to be doing with the funding we talked about hiring already but i think this really comes down to and i think the way we need to kind of describe it is a couple fold um the hiring is going to be driving several strategic kind of initiatives the biggest one is that the demand we have coming in is massive and we want to be able to accelerate to meet that demand this is probably the number one best case scenario for why somebody would want to ever raise money is you have the demand already and now you're you're you're

growing and escalating such that you can meet that demand we've seen such an amazing amount of uptake from rocky linux which is you know the number that we've we've uh been able to really drive down on in terms of a reliable figure is at least a quarter million downloads per month and if you think of how many installs that is it's a massive amount of installs it's a lot and we're trying at this point to keep up with that because i'm not going to say you know a large percentage or the majority or anything like that is is now looking for support because most people

are used to not having that support in centos so most people that are transitioning from centos aren't thinking of it from a support perspective but what we're finding is if you couple a really good customer focused model with appropriate value ads that add value to that open source community we're seeing uptake we're seeing you know we're getting inquiries we're getting requests we're starting to see all of these things starting to go through procurement processes we actually have to meet those demands now so best case scenario for why you would ever want to raise money is demand is there and you have to meet it you

have to scale up for that and that's exactly what we're seeing right now so we're scaling up to meet the demand that we're seeing we're also going to be accelerating certain pieces of our our roadmap in terms of features in terms of capability we have not only on the rocky side but on the fuzzball side which is the you know hpc 2.0 uh platform cloud platform that we have now developed we're seeing so much interest in that it's actually it's hard for us even to keep up with that and so we have been following with that as as quickly as we can and managing the

requests coming in for pocs but we are in early uh early user um access right now with pocs we're going to have a press release here coming out as this thing goes ga probably you know later uh q3ish and so that's going to happen here pretty soon but all of this funding is going to help accelerate all these things it's going to help drive customer success meet customer demand and and really just help us scale out as an organization uh robert i've been talking a lot is there anything you want to add on that or zane i mean i i i just put a little

bit of uh depth to it from a different perspective um i mean we have a cto that blows me away every time i talk to him right we have a noted linux author on staff now we have young engineers that are beyond brilliant that invest 18 to 24 hours a day to build build systems and get things out right we just hired a new vp of engineering that just absolutely blew me away yesterday right so we have a vp of services that blows me away every time i talk to him he has a team of people that are helping our customers every day that blow

me away so never have to ask people to do things twice everybody jumps everybody's doing things in their own labs the only thing i would say is that i'm always before greg when it comes to the latest releases of rocky he's usually asking me questions just making that point and i have rocky on more systems than he does right now but at the end of the day uh we just like to have fun and there's a lot of great people that we're just gonna add to this staff that are gonna do great things you all heard it how many rocky machines do you have robert

i am robert's escalation support team you all heard it no he's mine that's fantastic so i think richard had an idea where he would like to see some of the money go as well really really high quality liquor so i think that's all the questions it's all the questions that i had for you guys we're kind of up on time any closing closing comments other than thank you to bear we really appreciate it looking forward to where this takes us and the journey the journey ahead um i've got i've got a little bit yeah so um two bear led this round absolutely um but they

are by no means the only investors in this round we actually have a a great group of investors and we're going to be releasing prs here shortly that's going to highlight some of these other investors that are that are part of what it is that we're doing we're also going to be releasing additional prs on some of the team members that we have now that are joining us um advisory board members that have joined and i am so looking forward to being able to share all of this and you're going to see this coming very soon so pay attention watch out for this and if

you want to be part of one of the coolest things that i've ever done and actually a couple of them between rocky between other open source projects ciq and be part of all of this reach out to us we'd love to talk to you very nice robert anything to close with no just grateful for all of our investors um and uh the partnerships that every single one of them are already starting to engage with us on and and working extremely closely with us to help solve problems for all of their friends and people that can utilize all the solution sets that we have it's fantastic

so thank you guys very much for joining thank you to our investors and to our team internally that is growing like we said uh there's a lot of these a lot of these people that put in a lot of time to make this machine work and we really appreciate it there's a lot of behind the scenes stuff that most people don't know about so to all of you we really appreciate it and thank you and thanks for the continued effort uh we will add the links below for how to find a job from us and if you ever need anything else reach out uh there's

a link on there you can get get in contact with us we'd be happy to talk to you and see how we can help and we will see you again next week thank you very much bye