Piston, a forward-thinking startup co-founded by Vikram Sekhon and Shivam Shah, has just secured $7.5 million in seed funding, setting the stage for a major shake-up in cloud infrastructure automation. The round was backed by top-tier investors including Spark Capital, Pear VC, and BOND, underscoring strong confidence in Piston’s mission to streamline cloud operations for engineering teams.

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What Is Piston?

At its core, Piston is building infrastructure software that automates the messy, repetitive, and error-prone tasks that slow down developers and operations teams. Instead of relying on brittle, custom-built scripts or juggling dozens of tools to manage infrastructure, teams can rely on Piston’s platform to orchestrate and simplify their stack.

Whether it’s managing provisioning, deployment, scaling, or teardown of services, Piston provides a clean abstraction layer - one that fits natively into a team’s development workflow without adding extra complexity.

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Why It Matters Now

The modern cloud ecosystem is more fragmented than ever. Teams today use a combination of AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, and dozens of other tools just to keep their apps running. The complexity is overwhelming - and it’s costly.

In fact, a 2024 survey by Flexera found that 82% of enterprises cite managing cloud spend and complexity as a top concern. At the same time, developers lose an average of 15–20% of their productivity to infrastructure-related bottlenecks.

This is where Piston delivers major value. It doesn’t just patch over the complexity - it rewrites the playbook. By abstracting infrastructure into programmable workflows and eliminating repetitive toil, Piston enables engineering teams to move faster, reduce cloud waste, and improve deployment reliability.

And here’s what makes this shift profound: Founders who master infrastructure autonomy unlock a deeper compounding advantage - not just in speed, but in strategic flexibility. When infra becomes invisible, teams ship more, test more, and respond to the market faster. But more importantly, it frees leadership from reactive fire-fighting, allowing them to focus on building differentiated features instead of debugging pipelines.

This is the new frontier of dev productivity - not adding more dashboards, but removing the invisible drag that slows innovation down. Piston isn’t a sidecar. It’s becoming the backbone.

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Meet the Founders: Vikram Sekhon and Shivam Shah

Founders Vikram Sekhon and Shivam Shah bring a wealth of experience to the table. With backgrounds in systems engineering, cloud architecture, and developer tooling, they’ve seen firsthand how difficult infrastructure can become at scale. This frustration with the status quo led to the founding of Piston - driven by a shared vision to create a developer-first infrastructure platform that just works.

Sekhon and Shah have cultivated a strong product culture around simplicity, speed, and developer empathy - traits that are already resonating with early users.

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 A Booming Market Opportunity

The infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and DevOps automation space is undergoing massive transformation. According to MarketsandMarkets, the DevOps market size is projected to grow from $10.4 billion in 2023 to over $25.5 billion by 2028, at a CAGR of 19.7%.

And it’s not just about size - it's about urgency. The rise of platform engineering and internal developer platforms (IDPs) has accelerated the need for tools that deliver seamless, self-service infrastructure experiences.

A 2024 CNCF report found that 89% of organizations now run Kubernetes in production, and 64% of teams are building internal tooling to manage deployments more efficiently. These trends reflect growing demand for purpose-built solutions like Piston that bridge the gap between developer needs and ops scalability.

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What’s Next for Piston?

With fresh funding, Piston plans to expand its engineering team, double down on product development, and ramp up go-to-market efforts. The company is currently onboarding design partners and is set to roll out early access to a select group of cloud-native teams later this year.

Early adopters are expected to come from sectors like fintech, SaaS, AI/ML, and any other industry where infrastructure agility directly impacts product velocity.

As Piston grows, the team aims to build more opinionated workflows, integrations with GitOps systems, and native support for Kubernetes and Terraform out of the box.

Given the surge in demand for scalable developer platforms and the shift toward self-serve infrastructure, Piston’s timing couldn’t be better.

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The Market Opportunity

The DevOps and infrastructure automation market is expected to exceed $25 billion by 2028, according to Gartner. As companies continue to shift workloads to multi-cloud and hybrid environments, the need for more scalable, intelligent automation platforms is only going to grow.

Legacy infrastructure tools like Chef, Puppet, or Ansible are being phased out in favor of newer, API-first platforms that emphasize speed, reproducibility, and modularity. Piston is perfectly positioned to lead this next wave.

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What’s Next for Piston?

With fresh funding, Piston plans to expand its engineering team, double down on product development, and ramp up go-to-market efforts. The company is currently onboarding design partners and is set to roll out early access to a select group of cloud-native teams later this year.

Early adopters are expected to come from sectors like fintech, SaaS, AI/ML, and any other industry where infrastructure agility directly impacts product velocity.

As Piston grows, the team aims to build more opinionated workflows, integrations with GitOps systems, and native support for Kubernetes and Terraform out of the box.

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Final Thoughts

Piston is entering the cloud infrastructure scene at exactly the right time - with developer needs evolving and traditional tools falling behind. Their mission to abstract away infrastructure complexity and return control to developers is bold, but it's exactly what the industry needs right now.

With strong technical leadership, enthusiastic investor support, and a huge market waiting for innovation, Piston is one to watch closely in 2025 and beyond.