Ex-NASA CTO builds cloud dream team, launches Nebula

The cloud computing world has been anxious to hear former NASA CTO Chris Kemp’s plans since he left his post in the spring to pursue a startup venture, and on Wednesday morning, he introduced his new company, Nebula. It’s selling an OpenStack-based appliance for managing scale-out cloud deployments, and is backed by premier talent and investors.

Nebula isn’t disclosing how much it has raised, but Co-Founder and CEO Kemp said it‘s turned down “tens of millions.” It raised money from seed investors Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram — Google’s first three investors — and venture firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Highland Capital Partners.

Kemp’s co-founders are VP of Engineering Devin Carlen, formerly CTO of Anso Labs, and VP of Business Development Steve O’Hara, formerly founder of Prime Networks, OnFiber and CoreLogic. Anso Labs is the IT contractor (acquired by Rackspacein February) that wrote the Nova code to power NASA’s Nebula cloud, which now comprises the core compute component of OpenStack. Carlen was the first person to write code for Nova and led its development.

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Nebula also employs a team of software and hardware architects with significant experience at Google, Amazon Web Services, Walt Disney and Microsoft. They aren’t just random people either, Kemp told me; they’ve done really big things.