100+ Customers, 43 Million Deployments, and One Big Bet on AI
Hong Wang, Co-Founder and CEO, Akuity
Nearly a decade after building Argo CD, Akuity’s co-founder and CEO, Hong Wang, reflects on Akuity’s most pivotal year. The growth metrics, the AI wave that fueled demand, and the product milestones that made it all possible.
How We Got Here
When Jesse, Alex, and I started building the Argo Project in 2017, we weren't thinking about milestones or metrics — we were focused on making Kubernetes work for engineering teams at scale.
We founded Akuity in 2021 to give that open-source vision a commercial home, built on a simple belief we've held from day one: that serving our open-source community and delivering value for our customers are instrumental to our success.
I am proud of what we have built and I am excited by the momentum over the last year. We have 100+ customers, exceeded 150% in new ARR, and built out a scalable go-to-market motion, driving 80% of revenue growth from net-new customers. And that was all before we hit our 5th anniversary.
Our growth has been driven by many factors, from the widespread adoption of Argo CD and Kargo, an open source multi-stage GitOps promotion tool we built, to an expanded, more mature Akuity Platform to growing enterprise adoption of Akuity. But the biggest driver of Akuity's growth this year was AI.
AI impacted all aspects of our business - from increased demand for the Akuity Platform, to gaining traction in a new, high-value market segment, to bringing agentic capabilities to the Akuity Platform. Recent case studies with CoreWeave, Aleph Alpha, and Cowbell illustrate how we have helped companies deliver GitOps.
Finally, in addition to our expansion in the AI space, we have also expanded our promotion capabilities beyond Kubernetes to support Terraform and VMs. Now, companies can leverage the Akuity platform to promote across all of their environments.
Let’s dive into the details.
Generative AI Fueled Akuity’s Growth
AI coding assistants are now part of the developer toolkit, with almost half of all developers using them daily. AI Coding spend hit $4 billion in 2025 — up from $550M just a year prior, representing half of all departmental AI spend. AI Coding is the single largest category in the enterprise AI application layer.
While developers were writing code much faster and merging nearly twice as many pull requests, platform teams were drowning. They had more code to review, more deployments to manage, and more incidents to triage. The DORA metrics told the real story: deployment frequency and lead time stayed flat, even as the volume of code to deploy kept piling up. Writing code got faster, but shipping it safely did not.
The old way of promotion, using custom promotion scripts, became impossible to maintain at scale. Visibility into what was deployed where, and why, was fragmented across teams and tools. Guardrails were inconsistent or nonexistent. And as the number of environments and services grew, complexity outpaced any team's ability to manage it manually.
Platform teams needed something different: a centralized platform with built-in promotion workflows, end-to-end deployment visibility, policy-driven guardrails, and the reliability to operate at massive scale -and the Akuity Platform delivered. Teams leverage the Akuity platform, powered by Argo CD for deployment orchestration and Kargo for continuous environment promotion, to gain control and visibility across their deployments.
The impact - an increase in demand for Akuity. We nearly tripled our customer count in 2025, and NRR hit 130%. The Akuity Platform processed more than 43 million successful deployments — almost 10x what we saw in 2024.
AI Infrastructure Companies Turn to Akuity for Scale, Agility, and Reliability
AI Infrastructure emerged as a highly competitive and crowded market. Enterprise generative AI spending more than tripled in 2025, split almost evenly between two layers:
AI applications - software, copilots, and agents
AI infrastructure - foundation model APIs, model training, and data orchestration
AI Infrastructure companies need to move quickly, at scale, and with reliability and resiliency. Akuity delivers on their needs, enabling faster, more reliable deployments and, ultimately, a faster time-to-market.
As a result, we’ve seen an influx of AI Infrastructure customers, including companies such as CoreWeave, Aleph Alpha, Thinking Machines Lab, and Laurel. AI companies trust the Akuity Platform to streamline their application deployments and promotions.
Building Agentic AI that Delivers
In 2025, we launched new AI capabilities (Akuity Intelligence), bringing Akuity Agents and Insights Dashboards to our customers.
Unlike many of the SRE agents that companies are building today, Akuity is embedded in customers’ infrastructure. This provides Akuity Intelligence with the context, permissions, and ability to take action. Akuity’s AI Agents actively monitor, detect, and fix production issues. The Agents include a Deployment Advisor, an On-Call Agent, and a Promotion Advisor. Early adoption has been strong and we are seeing a continued investment in AI as we move into 2026.
Beyond Kubernetes: A Platform for Any Environment
One of the most significant product milestones since Akuity launched has been expanding the Akuity Platform beyond Kubernetes.
In December 2025, we introduced unified multi-environment delivery in the Akuity Platform — a single promotion workflow that handles application and infrastructure changes across Kubernetes, Terraform, VMs, and serverless environments. Teams can now run Terraform steps directly in Kargo, orchestrate complex cross-environment changes, and replace custom CI scripting with a declarative, GitOps-based approach — all under one consistent set of approvals, policies, and audit controls.
This marks a meaningful shift in what Akuity is: from the leading GitOps platform for Kubernetes, to a centralized software delivery platform for any application, any environment.
Argo CD & Kargo: Community Growth
As the creators and maintainers of Argo CD and Kargo, we've always believed that a project's strength is reflected in its community.
Argo CD surpassed 20,000 GitHub Stars, but what's more interesting is what's happening in production. Enterprise adoption has nearly doubled, from 34% to 67%, and the 2025 CNCF End User Survey found that 97% of Argo CD users run it in production environments.
This reflects that infrastructure teams rely on Argo CD for their deployments. It's why the broader Argo project - Argo CD, Argo Workflows, Argo Rollouts, and Argo Events - has consistently ranked among the top four CNCF projects for development velocity for 2024 and 2025, behind Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry.
Kargo, our open-source continuous promotion engine powering Akuity Platform, is following a similar trajectory. It has tripled its GitHub star count since the start of 2024 and is seeing real enterprise adoption with measurable outcomes. In fact, recent case studies with Deutsche Telekom, a global telecommunications company, and Jumpcloud, a cloud directory service, highlight how companies are using Kargo in the real world at a massive scale.
Scaling for Growth
To continue to innovate on the platform and grow customer adoption, we are also investing in expanding our team and infrastructure.
In the past year, we've doubled the team across engineering, sales, product, and marketing. Team expansion has been strategic and focused on high-impact roles.
Akuity Company Offsite - February 2026
We also added focus on expanding our presence in Europe, building an EU-based go-to-market team, and launching a new EU data region. Enterprises in the EU operate under a different set of requirements — including data residency, compliance, and sovereignty — and an EU-based team and data center enable us to meet them. The Akuity Platform is SOC 2 Type II certified and compliant with ISO 27001, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.
Looking to 2026 and Beyond
We have built a solid foundation and will continue to innovate and build to meet the ever-evolving needs of the enterprise. Looking to 2026 and beyond, we will focus on the following areas:
AI-driven enterprise software delivery: Akuity is already moving beyond executing deployments to understanding them, surfacing risk, and acting autonomously on failure patterns. We’ll continue to deepen these capabilities as our platform matures.
Deploying anything, anywhere: Expanding beyond Kubernetes to become the single control plane for VMs, serverless, Terraform, and every environment in between.
Developer experience: Continuing to invest in making great delivery feel effortless, from first commit to production.
It's been nearly a decade since Jesse, Alex, and I started working on Argo CD. What began as a better way to deploy software on Kubernetes has grown into something much larger — a platform, a company, a community. Software delivery is now one of the most critical and most interesting problems in infrastructure, and I feel fortunate that we get to work on it every day.
If you'd like to learn more about Akuity or join a team that's just getting started, we'd love to hear from you.
— Hong Wang, Co-Founder and CEO, Akuity
