Enterprise Argo company Akuity raises $20 million to enable Kubernetes app delivery

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Akuitya company that aims to become the de facto “Argo enterprise” company for the delivery of Kubernetes apps has raised $20 million in a series of A funding rounds.

As with many successful open source projects, Kubernetes has spawned an ecosystem of products and commercial businesses that spans everything from security to troubleshooting. One such company is Akuity, which comes from the co-creators of argoa popular open-source toolset used by Google, Tesla, Red Hat and more to orchestrate their application delivery on Kubernetes.

Kubernetes probably needs little introduction as it has become one of the technology most popular and powerful open source projects — essentially, Kubernetes helps engineering teams increase their speed and agility by automating many of the processes involved in managing containerized applications.

Argo, for his part, appeared on the open source scene in 2017 while software engineers Hong Wang and Jesse Suen worked at a Kubernetes-focused company called Applatix. Intuitive then bought Applatix the following year, with Wang and Suen eventually leaving to focus their efforts on developing Argo into a thriving community project with commercial potential. And that’s essentially what Akuity is all about.

Under the hood

Accessible through a user interface and command-line interface, Argo is a bundle of projects for managing clusters, running workflows, and making the most of Kubernetes – this includes a continuous delivery tool called Argo CDand a Kubernetes controller called Argo implementations that helps businesses incrementally introduce updates to Kubernetes applications.

On the commercial side, Akuity offers a fully managed CD tool (currently in beta) for Kubernetes that can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises, and a enterprise-grade incarnation that includes a slew of additional features and services on top of the main open-source Argo project, such as disaster recovery and service-level agreements (SLAs).

The company’s new cash injection comes less than a year after Akuity left stealth with a small tranche of seed capital, and the Sunnyvale, California-based company already has stiff competition in the form of codefreshanother venture-backed company commercializing Argo.

However, since Akuity is spearheaded by the original Argo creators – with another co-creators of the project, Alexander Matyushentsev, recently joined as lead architect – this arguably gives Akuity a bit of an edge, even if it’s at an earlier stage in its journey.

“As the original creators of Argo, and managing the software suite for 4,000 developers at Intuit, no other company has the deepest knowledge and understanding of the product, use cases and pain points accumulated over the past six years. . years,” co-founder and CTO Jesse Suen told VentureBeat. “We want to leverage our experience and focus on solving the most critical unresolved issues in the devops space that complement and enhance the Argo experience.”

Akuity’s core platform remains a closed beta product for now, with general availability expected later in 2022. And that’s about where the new $20 million investment will help.

“With the additional resources, we can not only launch the Akuity Platform, but also make Argo even better,” said Suen. “Open source is in our DNA and we are 100% committed to making Argo the most successful project for Kubernetes.”

While CEO Hong Wang said the company already has real, paying customers, he declined to confirm specific customer names.

“Since launching our company last October, we’ve closed several Fortune 1000 business deals — more deals are currently in the price-talk phase,” Wang said.

Akuity’s Series A round was led by Lead Edge Capital and Decibel Partners, with the participation of numerous investors.