Aranya launches with $11M to turn bare-metal servers into AI clusters in 48 hours

The startup, founded last year, says it has already been tasked with managing more than $500 million worth of GPU hardware for leading AI inference providers and data centers. Aranya's flagship technology is an open-source engine called clusterdOS, built on Kubernetes, that provides a framework for deploying and maintaining infrastructure through declarative configuration files. It also automates the orchestration of containerized workloads, networking and storage resources across various hardware environments.

CEO Christian Bhatia Ondaatje said in a written response that clusterdOS is “built for organization-scale computing, not for managing individual applications or isolated workloads.” The company says it addresses Kubernetes’ shortcomings in two critical areas: while Kubernetes can reschedule a pod off a failing node, it does not diagnose the root cause. “ClusterdOS discovers, diagnoses and resolves the hardware itself,” Ondaatje said, adding that it handles GPU thermal events, error-correcting code errors and networking faults. The engine is not Kubernetes-exclusive and also encompasses virtual machine-based and SLURM job scheduling, because “real GPU infrastructure is heterogeneous and the OS layer has to absorb that.”

Aranya promises it can transform any quantity of racked hardware into a cohesive, self-healing cluster within 48 hours, including custom storage and networking. “We’ve matched that timeline repeatedly, and no other operator does it consistently for custom architecture,” Ondaatje said. The system provides federated control across multiple clusters and uses agents that “live inside the cluster continuously and adapt to what that cluster needs” to autonomously detect and remediate issues before they escalate.

The OS operates under strict permission controls. “The multicluster OS cannot see or access anything the organization hasn’t explicitly granted it,” Ondaatje said. “It’s governed by strict multitenancy and role-based permissions at the OS level. Access is granted, not assumed.” Aranya is also introducing a natural-language interface that lets engineers manage infrastructure with plain commands, such as spinning up inference endpoints or adding nodes, without touching configuration files. “A request in Slack resolves to the same permitted action set the engineer already has,” he said.

The company claims the software delivers “dramatic reductions in downtime at both the cluster and datacenter scale” through proactive symptom detection. Its federated architecture allows teams to manage all clusters as a unified fleet, while built-in utilization monitoring helps rightsize workloads and optimize costs. Aranya’s system also enables customers to recycle idle compute, further reducing operating expenses.

With the fresh capital, Aranya plans to expand its engineering and sales/marketing teams and launch a full multicluster interface. The round includes a $9 million seed led by First Round Capital with participation from BoxGroup, Vermilion Cliffs and Asylum Ventures, plus a $2 million pre-seed round led by Asylum Ventures.