Platform engineering that is as easy as drawing system diagrams and extensible as though made with magic.

Deploying software infrastructure has become a big jumble of moving parts, making it difficult to build, deploy and roll out updates. Guidepad makes sense of that mess through one simple and flexible interface that abstracts all the moving parts, allowing platform and software engineering teams to easily build, deploy, and maintain whole environments while limiting errors.

More specifically, modern platform engineering and software infrastructure have become untenable due to the explosive proliferation of infrastructure tools, data and compute environments, services, APIs, and workflow automation platforms–layers upon disconnected layers.

Guidepad creates order of of this chaos by bringing together infrastructure and provisioning systems (Terraform, Kubernetes, cloud APIs), deployment environments (cloud, edge, on-prem), application logic (APIs, RPCs), workflow orchestration, and messaging into a single unified abstraction layer. It treats services, state transitions, workflows, operations, and types as declarative data, and automates coordination across all these layers, allowing engineering organizations to develop, evolve, and maintain complex distributed systems more coherently and quickly while reducing errors. 

Why We Invested

Guidepad validated acute demand for their platform in working with early customers including the National Security Agency (NSA). In fact, the platform was developed organically as a tool used by the founders’ platform engineering firm. Reggie and Mat started building abstracted orchestration and migration tools to help them quickly, easily, and safely perform tasks such as migrating data and updating software infrastructure components. With time, they also built an impressively intuitive administration interface that even non-technical team members could easily grasp and use. 

The level of engineering and traction that Reggie and Mat were able to achieve while bootstrapping their company was truly dazzling. (You have to see Guidepad to appreciate how incredible it is!) Just as impressive was their growing pipeline of prospective customers, many of whom were major governmental and defence organizations–extremely difficult to impress.

Beyond their impressive product and execution, we were drawn to both Reggie and Mat’s stories of persistence, inventiveness, obsessive learning, and constantly pushing themselves to tackle new challenges and climb to new heights. 

Reginald (Reggie) Wilkerson, co-founder and CEO, cut his teeth on implementing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools and consulting for top-tier global companies such as Oracle and Deloitte. Later on, Reggie helped government agencies and enterprises convert legacy systems to modern ones as well as migrating infrastructure from on-premises systems to the cloud and vice versa. Eventually, Reggie opened a consulting firm, RDW Technologies, that won a major contract with the NSA and involved deploying Kubernetes to distributed and disjointed cryptographic systems. At that point, he hired Mat to help, and together they killed it. 

Mathew (Mat) Citrarella, the CTO, is a brilliant engineer, who got his start as an ML and bioinformatics engineer investigating the neurological development of sea creatures (how cool!) in The Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience at the University of Florida. Prior to that, Mat earned his M.S. in computer science and Ph.D. in bioinformatics and genomics also from the University of Florida. Later Mat went to work in industry as bioinformatics lead scientist at WaferGen Biosystems, Adaptive Biotechnologies, and Ariosa Diagnostics before joining Britelite Immersive as its Head of Engineering and Systems Architect. Mat later joined Reggie at RDW Technologies to build the precursor to Guidepad, an automation framework that was used to deploy, manage and build systems my last employer used at the 2017 Super Bowl and the Fifa World Cup in Russia in 2018.

Guidepad Now and in the Future

With Beta Boom’s investment, Guidepad will continue to expand its novel platform engineering solution to new enterprise customers and major government organizations. In the coming years, we think Guidepad can become the de-facto platform orchestration layer as the universe of platform components continues to balloon, allowing technical and non-technical users to seamlessly build, deploy, and update data and software infrastructure.

If you’d like to get in touch with Guidepad, connect with Reggie Wilkerson on LinkedIn or via email at reggie[at]guidepad.io.

About Beta Boom

Beta Boom is a pre-seed venture capital fund investing in Enterprise, Cybersecurity, Digital Health and Future of Work startups that are led by founders that don’t fit the old Silicon Valley mold. We invest in self-made, driven, and tenacious founders rather than diplomas, resumes, or networks. Applications are open; warm introductions are not encouraged.