Elastera gets a little seed money to be your shopping cart in the cloud (exclusive)

Osvaldo Spadano looked all over the Internet for a company that would excel at operating e-commerce websites like the one he worked at, Alexandalexa, a seller of kids’ clothing. He never found what he wanted.

“The poor service received from the industry and the many headaches made me decide to fix this nonsense out of pure frustration,” Spadano wrote in an email to VentureBeat.

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He designed his startup, Elastera, to run Magento open-source e-commerce software on the widely used Amazon Web Services public cloud. And investors like the way things are going. Elastera has now secured a $350,000 round of seed funding, Spadano told VentureBeat. Backers include AngelLab, Lean Enterprise Academy founder Daniel Jones, and former Acquia executive Peter Guagenti.

The investment underlines the fragmentation and specialization now underway in the cloud-infrastructure market.

Google, Amazon, and Microsoft compete hard to charge the least amount of money for developers to run applications on their public clouds.

Meanwhile, other cloud providers are focusing on distinguishing features. Virtustream has made investments to gain security advantages. IBM is pursuing an advantage from based on geographical availability. Rackspace has tried out a digital-marketing angle. DigitalOcean has shown considerable growth while limiting itself to simple offerings.

With Elastera, companies don’t need to worry about configuring their clouds to scale as demand increases during, say, a blowout sale. In that sense, it’s more like a platform-as-a-service like Heroku or Engine Yard, except this is narrowly tailored for e-commerce.

And Elastera’s specialty might not be so crazy after all. Engine Yard itself announced support for applications based on Magento earlier this month.

EBay bought Magento in 2011. Under eBay, Magento still offers premium products based on the free open-source Magento software, which, like WordPress and Drupal, is similar to a content-management system (CMS).

London-based Elastera started last year. Right now, Elastera’s workforce comprises just its three founders. That will change as a result of the funding. And Elastera wants to take on more customers; right now it counts three, Spadano wrote.

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The product could evolve, too.

“[W]e might create a multi-tenant format, to fully serve agencies and tap into a lower customer-segment,” Spadano wrote. There is demand out there, and retailers have started demanding cloud from their agencies.”