There are lots of niche operations, but they tend to build their domain-specific work on top of these cloud providers. AWS's fork of Elasticsearch (ES) is a go

There are lots of niche operations, but they tend to build their domain-specific work on top of these cloud providers. AWS's fork of Elasticsearch (ES) is a good example of the operationalization you talk about. If I was building a niche eDiscovery solution for the compliance market on top of ES I'm likely to want to offer that on AWS or another cloud provider at some point. If they offer their managed version of it, then I don't have to support it. You can make obvious arguments like special extensions, or all compliance customers don't use the public cloud, but ultimately many users are going in that direction. Any type of general-purpose tool like ES is ripe for the picking by any cloud provider when it gets popular. The only options I see are licensing it in a way that's prohibitive for adoption by cloud providers, or engaging them early to become their subcontracted maintainer for the product on their cloud so that you remain in the value chain. Ultimately, it's not the type of business that should be taking VC money because the upside is, so limited when you have the typical successful outcome. The only way to get to an outcome that VCs might like is to use the income stream, or talent acquisition, from the open source product to pivot into something that isn't as limited. Doing that is really hard.