This Polish startup aims to “do to open source what DigitalOcean did to SaaS”

Picture credit: Damian Nowak/YouTube

Say hello to VirtKick. This startup, based out of Gdansk, Poland, has a simple goal: to make virtualisation easier.

The company has launched an Indiegogo campaign to put together an ambitious $57,000 to add a series of new features, but the company aims to make complexity with spinning up virtual machines a thing of the past.

“Virtualisation technology is tough,” VirtKick trumpets in a press release. “DigitalOcean did their job and revolutionised the cloud/VPs business. But it doesn’t look that great in [the] open source world.

“Existing open source cloud panels are hard to setup and use – they focus on technological aspects, not users’ needs. VirtKick solves it – it’s an open source cloud panel allowing anyone to become their [own] VPS provider and regain full control over cloud.”

With almost 80,000 followers on Twitter and series A funding of $37.2 million in the bank, cloud hosting firm DigitalOcean is a suitable company to look up to for VirtKick.

As it’s all open source, naturally every line of code the company writes will be available on GitHub. Currently you can spin up a VM in three clicks, as you can see in a demo here, but VirtKick aims in future to be able to do it in one.

“The project is revolutionary,” said VirtKick co-founder Damian Nowak in an email. “There’s no open source project that would simply let users manage their virtualisation without having to dig into configuration files, system internals, networks and such.”

VirtKick is offering ‘bundles’ – tasks to be ticked off as soon as a certain amount of money is raised. $7,000 will enable the one-click install of VMs, $17,000 will enable the implementation of credit card payments and invoices, while later deals hint at partnerships between Amazon, SoftLayer, and MIT among others.

You can take a look at the hosted alpha here and have a play around, and the company’s video below: