Run by 500 Global and backed by Sanabil Investments, the program brings together a cohort of high-potential startups from across the world, selected from a competitive application process. Pvotal earned its place alongside sixteen other startups spanning AI, sustainability, insurance, finance, retail, healthcare and mental wellness. Pvotal was selected because of the traction and ambition behind Infrastream; our platform designed to standardise and simplify GCP delivery for scaling teams. Infrastream is the platform engineering function giving your team the GCP playbook, tooling, and expertise to standardise delivery, protect committed revenue, unlock deals you're currently turning away, and remove the infrastructure ceiling on your growth, at a fraction of the cost of building it in-house.
The program also gave us the space to pressure test Infrastream, strengthen the business model, and build repeatable growth engines using proven frameworks and hands-on expert mentorship.
As founders building infrastructure software, it’s easy to stay heads down. You’re in perpetual execution mode and have all your gears set to build. You’re shipping features, taking sales calls, meeting investors, troubleshooting problems daily. Sanabil gave us the forcing function to zoom out, take a step back and ask harder questions: Are we instrumenting the right growth signals? Are we targeting the highest intent customer? Is our positioning sharp enough? Are we pricing based on value?
Most of all it validated that our approach was aligned, our frameworks were solid and our experiments were focused in the right direction.
The Growth Phase
Here are some of the biggest reflections we’re taking back with us to direct our efforts on the next stage: Growth.
- Not every person facing the problem you solve is an ideal customer. Every product has a customer that desires their product and is actively seeking out a solution, find those individuals and target them. Urgency fundamentally drives value.
- Competition isn't limited to platforms solving the same problems you are. It's easy to benchmark only against similar solutions. But a competitor can be any alternative that satisfies the same customer need, regardless of how closely it resembles your product. This reframe forced us to think bigger. Infrastream isn't just competing with other infrastructure tooling, it's competing with alternative architectural decisions and even other strategic priorities within a company. That means our real job is making Infrastream the most defensible answer to the question: how do we scale GCP delivery without hiring a full platform team?
- Pricing is about more than just your costs, it’s about the value your product brings to the table. Good pricing sits at the intersection of perceived value, market conditions and sustainable profitability. For Infrastream, that value is measurable in engineering hours recovered, cloud waste eliminated, and GCP revenue protected.
- Deliberate focus compounds. Companies don’t win by doing everything in parallel, they win by choosing deliberately. Choosing a clear ICP, a small number of Go to Market channels to test deeply. Experiments over guessing, always.
- Vanity metrics look good in decks. Actionable metrics change decisions. The market rewards real impact, retention, activation, expansion — not numbers that don't hold weight under scrutiny.
- Learning is a career long compounding asset
- There is no short cut to growth
Attending Sanabil didn’t radically change what we’re building here at Pvotal, it sharpened how we are building it.
It pushed us to simplify. Clarify. Focus.
We're back and more focused than ever on bringing Infrastream to you. If you're a CTO, Platform Lead, or Head of DevOps actively looking for the playbook, tooling, and expertise to standardise GCP delivery across your products, you're in the right place. Infrastream was built for you. This is where platform engineering is made simple, scalable, and cost-efficient.
