Alex Polvi made a name for himself in the tech industry back in 2010 at the ripe old age of 25. That's when Rackspace bought his first startup, Cloudkick, for an estimated $30 million.
Now he's back with his new company, CoreOS, and it's worth watching for several reasons.
First, it's got interesting technology. CoreOS makes an operating system based on Linux that works like the custom operating system Google built for itself. (CoreOS even has former a former Googler on its team.)
The upshot is it lets corporate computer servers run more software using less hardware.
Second, CoreOS, a Y Combinator startup, has some interesting angels. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, super angel Ron Conway and football great Joe Montana, reports Bloomberg's Ari Levy. Montana invested after attending Y Combinator's pitch day in August. He was impressed by the young Polvi, he told Bloomberg.
The seed round was undisclosed but somewhere between $1 and $5 million, TechCrunch's Alex Williams reports.
On top of that, CoreOS's has one of the rock stars of the Linux world as its advisor, Greg Kroah-Hartman. Kroah-Hartman is one of two top people leading Linux. The other is Linux creator Linus Torvalds.
Like Linux, CoreOS is free and open source. Anyone can take it, use it, modify it. The company will make money selling for subscriptions to enterprises who want to pay for extra support.
