Aravolta Wants to Replace Five Data Center Tools With One

The Macro: Data Centers Are the Backbone Nobody Talks About

Every conversation about AI infrastructure eventually lands on compute. Who has the GPUs, how many, where are they racked. But the physical buildings those GPUs live in are running on software stacks that would embarrass most SaaS companies. I’m talking about data center infrastructure management, and the state of it is genuinely bad.

A typical data center runs five separate systems: BMS for building management, EPMS for electrical power monitoring, SCADA for supervisory control, a NOC dashboard for network operations, and a traditional DCIM platform trying to tie it all together. These systems usually come from different vendors, were installed at different times, speak different protocols, and display their data in different dashboards that different teams are responsible for checking.

The result is that the people operating a $100 million facility are Alt-Tabbing between five monitoring tools to figure out if something is wrong. That’s not a technology problem. That’s a duct tape problem.

Nlyte, Sunbird, and Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure are the established players in DCIM. They work. They’re also slow to deploy, expensive to maintain, and built for a world where data centers were static assets that changed configurations once a quarter. The AI boom has turned data centers into fast-moving operations that add and remove capacity constantly, and the legacy tools haven’t kept up.

The opportunity is driven by a simple fact: the world is building data centers faster than at any point in history. Hyperscalers, colocation providers, and enterprise operators are all expanding. Every new facility needs monitoring software. Every existing facility is frustrated with what they have.

The Micro: Microsoft Alumni Who Saw the Problem From the Inside

Aravolta is a four-person team out of San Francisco. Margarita Groisman and Jack Sutton are the founders. Groisman previously worked on data center deployments at Microsoft, which is exactly the kind of background you want for a product like this. She saw how the sausage gets made at hyperscale and apparently decided the tooling was bad enough to start a company over it.

The product consolidates those five separate systems into a single platform. BMS, EPMS, SCADA, NOC, and DCIM all in one interface. That’s the pitch, and it’s the kind of pitch that either works brilliantly or collapses under its own ambition. So far, it seems to be working.

The technical breadth is impressive. Aravolta supports SNMPv3, Redfish, IPMI 2.0, Modbus TCP and RTU, BACnet, OPC-UA, and gNMI. If you don’t know what those are, they’re the alphabet soup of protocols that data center equipment speaks. Supporting all of them means Aravolta can talk to gear from Cisco, Dell, HP, Schneider Electric, Vertiv, Eaton, and about twenty other vendors. That’s a big deal because data centers are multi-vendor environments by default, and any monitoring tool that only works with one vendor’s equipment is dead on arrival.

The deployment claim is the most interesting part: 48 hours from start to live. They use an auto-discovery engine that scans networks and classifies over 25,000 device types automatically. The four-step process is network discovery (2-4 hours), auto-configuration (4-8 hours), validation (4-8 hours), go live (2-4 hours). Compare that to traditional DCIM deployments, which routinely take months.

They’ve raised $5.1 million and came through YC’s Spring 2025 batch. The product includes branch circuit monitoring with sub-second accuracy, automated tenant billing, white-label customer portals, multi-site management, and SCADA control for remote equipment operation. That’s a lot of surface area, but for a DCIM replacement, you need all of it. Operators aren’t going to adopt a tool that handles power monitoring but not cooling.

Pricing is per-device with no per-point fees, which is a direct shot at legacy vendors who charge by the data point and end up costing a fortune at scale. They’re SOC 2 Type I and II certified, ISO 27001, and HIPAA compliant.

The Verdict

I think Aravolta is building the right product at the right time. The data center construction boom means there are new facilities coming online that don’t want to install five separate legacy systems. And existing facilities are looking at their monitoring stacks and wondering why they’re paying six figures a year for tools that still can’t show them a unified view of their operations.

The 48-hour deployment claim is the thing that will either make or break them. If it’s real and repeatable across different facility types, it removes the biggest objection to switching: “we can’t afford the downtime and migration effort.” Traditional DCIM migrations are painful enough that operators tolerate bad software rather than switch. If Aravolta actually deploys in two days, that objection disappears.

The risk is that consolidation products tend to be good at everything and great at nothing. When you replace five tools with one, you need to be at least 80% as good as each specialized tool, or operators will keep the specialized tool for the critical function and use yours for the rest. That’s a death sentence for a consolidation play.

Thirty days, I want to hear from an operator who deployed Aravolta and ripped out their existing DCIM. Not a testimonial. A case study with specifics. Sixty days, I want to see the sales pipeline. Enterprise infrastructure sales cycles are long, and a four-person team needs to close deals fast enough to justify the $5.1 million raise. Ninety days, the question is whether they’re winning against Nlyte and Sunbird in head-to-head evaluations or mostly selling into greenfield facilities. Both are good, but the competitive dynamics are completely different.