Former Vice President of Oracle has joined CAST AI, a startup located in Vilnius

CAST AI, the US-based startup which opened its development office in Vilnius earlier this year, is expanding, and attracting  top global talent. Leon Kuperman, the former Vice President, Cloud Security at Oracle, has recently joined CAST AI as the CTO of the company. Leon is a world-known expert in cloud computing, who has more than 25 years of experience in product management, software design, and development.

L. Kuperman will work directly with the team in Vilnius, transferring his knowledge and expertise, as 95% of CAST AI development is performed locally. The team in Vilnius is working to solve the most challenging problems many companies face around Kubernetes operations. This includes the challenge of running Kubernetes across multiple cloud providers simultaneously.

The product the CAST AI team is developing will allow the company to migrate to a different cloud service provider, or use several cloud providers‘ services at the same time with several pushes of the button.

‘Starting an idea from the very beginning allows a team to innovate in a way that can change the industry. Having worked in the field of cloud computing for more than two decades, I know that this product could save resources and spare headaches for millions of users worldwide. It’s not just about marginally improving a process or user experience, but rather creating a tenfold benefit that changes the way people work forever. I have been working closely  with the team in Vilnius, and I am excited about the ways we will  revolutionize the IaaS field‘, says Kuperman.

One of the practices Leon brings from his previous US Based startups is the ‘lean startup‘ approach, which aims to shorten development cycles and rapidly discover a true product-market fit.In contrast to the archaic model of building a product development roadmap and fully executing it before showing the prototype to the public, this philosophy stresses the importance of experimentation, customer feedback, and iterative design. CAST AI will ship changes early and often to solicit feedback and watch how users interact with the product. This will shape and inform the product roadmap in a tight feedback loop.

‘I am a strong believer that products should be built to solve customers’ biggest pain points and that benefits should not be marginal but rather exponential. It’s a myth that a company  should hide its product until the last moment. On the contrary, the more feedback you receive, the better your product will be, at all stages of the product life cycle. This exercise has become a regular practice for many startups. This process also allows us to build a community around our product and establish a relationship between our users and our development  team’, explains Kuperman.

He also notes that dedication to the ‘lean startup‘ method means that code is released to production daily, while usually, other companies tend to release monthly, weekly or even quarterly. This means that everything at CAST AI needs to be automated, including testing and the deployment processes. Devops culture is a key driver at CAST and automation skills are a must for anyone joining the team.

Currently, there are 26  employees at CAST AI, 19 of them are located in Vilnius. The plan is to expand its Vilnius-based team to 100 people in three upcoming years. The company is actively expanding by attracting professionals from IT, marketing, sales and business development fields.

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CAST AI provides an estimation of cloud expenses based on publicly accessible information. It is an efficient, cost-effective multi-cloud management platform. It was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in North Miami Beach, Florida. CAST AI has development and operations centers in Vilnius.