The Story of Macrometa: Building the Future of Cloud Computing

In 2013, while most tech companies were racing to adopt cloud computing, Chetan Venkatesh and his co-founder Durga Gokina were already asking what comes next. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Chetan shared how this forward-thinking question led to the creation of Macrometa, a company that’s fundamentally reimagining how data moves through the internet.

The Genesis Question “This cloud thing is huge, and obviously everyone’s going to be on the cloud by the end of this decade. What comes after that?” This question, posed in 2013, became the catalyst for Macrometa’s journey. As Chetan explains, “When you’re sitting in 2013 and 2014 and you’re trying to think about what the world looks like in 2023, which is where we are now, you tend to think it’s more of the same. And I’ve been wrong every time I’ve sort of linearly projected that it’s more of the same.”

Finding the Gap The founders realized that whatever came after cloud computing would need to solve problems that the cloud couldn’t address. “Because of the way the cloud is technically architected in these giant data centers in remote regions around the world… things get really slow,” Chetan notes. This insight led them to focus on speed and data accessibility, particularly as digital services become increasingly data-driven.

Building the Solution Macrometa’s answer was to create what they call the Global Data Network, a platform that fundamentally changes how data moves through the internet. “We built a platform that consists of a software layer that connects hundreds of regions around the world, hundreds of little data centers around the world, and makes data available in all these regions locally,” Chetan explains.

The impact of this approach is significant. As Chetan describes, “We’ve built an application platform and data network that can deliver events, data and data driven services and experiences in 50 milliseconds, which is faster than the brain can comprehend it.” To put this in perspective, he notes that “the best athletes have a reaction time of about 75 milliseconds and the average human has a reaction time that’s over 100 milliseconds.”

Early Traction The company’s growth has been remarkable, with Chetan noting they’ve “gone from zero to 60 plus paying customers in 18-20 months.” These aren’t just any customers – they include “some of the largest customers in the world” including major enterprises like “the third biggest Internet service provider in the US” and customers building applications that will “serve 100 million plus users worldwide.”

The Three Horizons Looking to the future, Macrometa has ambitious plans across three key horizons. The first focuses on real-time data opportunities. As Chetan explains, “Almost every digital service in the future is going to be real time. It’s going to be aware of what’s happening in your environment, it’s going to incorporate all those variables and it’s going to assist the way you do your work.”

The second horizon involves becoming a partner-friendly organization, recognizing that “partners tend to be the trusted advisors to lots and lots of customers.”

The third and perhaps most ambitious horizon involves pioneering carbon-conscious computing. “By 2035, data centers and cloud computing will be the biggest, if not one of the three biggest contributors to carbon and global warming and climate change,” Chetan warns. Macrometa is building awareness of ecological impact directly into their platform, allowing developers to understand and optimize their applications’ carbon footprint.

This vision represents a fundamental shift in how we think about cloud computing and data infrastructure. As digital experiences become more immersive and data-intensive, Macrometa’s approach to faster, more efficient data delivery could prove transformative. As Chetan puts it, “The world’s changing a lot and you need a new kind of a cloud infrastructure to support that new world.”