Announcing Akuity's $20M Series A Funding

We are delighted to announce that six months after completing our Seed funding round ($4.5M), we have raised an additional $20M in Series A funding led by Lead Edge Capital, alongside our existing investor Decibel Partners. This funding will allow us to forge ahead in providing enterprise-grade Argo distribution to all and our plans to develop a DevOps platform for Kubernetes powered by Argo.

Why We Started Argo

Over five years ago, we began our journey to run containerized workloads in the public cloud using Kubernetes. It was immediately apparent that Kubernetes would fundamentally transform the way developers deliver and manage their applications. We realized its extensibility had incredible potential to extend Kubernetes’ capabilities well beyond its original use case of running containerized applications. Instead, Kubernetes would become a universal orchestrator for operating everything from infrastructure, to databases, to batch processing. However, we also recognized its inherent complexity and the need for better tooling to provide a simpler developer experience while preserving the power of the underlying platform.

What Argo Brings

The Argo project was born out of our vision of leveraging Kubernetes to its fullest potential. As our own usage of Kubernetes continued to grow at Applatix and later Intuit, each project was created to address shortcomings we identified as well as enhance the capabilities and user experience of Kubernetes. We created Argo Workflows to schedule and orchestrate massively parallel, complex workflows on Kubernetes, where every step ran as a container. It enabled developers and ML engineers to leverage their Kubernetes clusters as an auto-scaling compute grid. The applications for this are endless, ranging from ETL jobs, CI/CD pipelines, as well as machine learning and data processing jobs.

We created Argo CD out of the need for an enterprise-grade, cloud-native continuous delivery system purposely built for Kubernetes. It leaves behind the baggage of legacy systems, leveraging modern techniques such as GitOps to systematically provision both applications and infrastructure. Argo CD provides a powerful, real-time dashboard for monitoring application health, detecting configuration drift, and troubleshooting, and is trusted in production by hundreds of enterprises.

Continuous delivery eventually evolved into the desire for progressive delivery with the Argo Rollouts project. Rollouts brings safer update strategies to Kubernetes workloads, such as blue-green and canary deployments, and integrates with the most popular ingress controllers, service meshes, observability tools to drive automated promotions and rollbacks of services.

Why We Started Akuity

We believe that Argo is an extremely powerful set of tools that enable engineers to get the most out of Kubernetes. We’ve proven this by building the critical tools that enabled five thousand Intuit engineers to use Kubernetes efficiently. However, it took us years of false starts, trial and error to formulate a developer experience with the right patterns that would scale with the explosive adoption of Kubernetes.

As we spoke with Kubernetes end-users at other companies, it was clear that organizations who were following in our footsteps were also running into the same exact growing pains and challenges that we faced. The solutions were often bespoke CI workflows relying on complex and fragile shell scripts, and still did not provide an ideal experience for developers.

We believe that no company should have to run large platform/devx teams only to reinvent the wheel and invest so much time and effort to get a half-baked solution. Akuity’s mission is to modernize the cloud-native application delivery landscape and provide a delightful end-to-end developer experience that just works. We aim towards a bold goal of building the most advanced application delivery platform for Kubernetes, powered by the Argo Project.

Rest assured that we don't plan to forget our roots. Argo is an open source project that is thriving thanks to the awesome community around it, and Akuity is committed to remaining a core contributor and dedicating even more energy to the project.

What Makes The Akuity Platform Different

The strong foundation of Kubernetes and Argo uniquely positions Akuity to build a very powerful but lightweight platform. We don't have to reinvent foundations and teach our users new concepts. Instead, we can jump straight to the point and work on solving concrete pain points.

The Akuity Platform will focus on the following main areas:

The Best Developer Experience for Kubernetes.

The Akuity Platform will solve the real-life DevOps use cases using battle-tested patterns packaged into a product with the best possible developer experience.

No need to keep rebuilding similar bespoke CI/CD GitOps patterns again and again. Using the platform, you can bootstrap a deployment repository with an opinionated directory structure and organize complex multi-stage deployment processes using pre-canned templates.

Enterprise Ready from Day One.

The maintenance-free DevOps platform that is scalable, reliable, secure, and packaged with must-have enterprise features.

The Akuity Platform is going to have a built-in audit trail that captures every platform settings change, integration with third-party services that help you introduce change management into your CD process with a click of a button, and many more features.

End to End Analytics and Insights.

The Akuity Platform is based and deeply integrated with Argo, which makes it uniquely positioned to provide deep insights into what is happening with the company infrastructure.

Leverage the Akuity Platform to see the history of application deployments, use powerful dashboards to correlate problems with recent changes, observe historical trends, and more.

Sign up for our Akuity Platform Closed Beta program today.

Want to Help Open Source? We’re hiring!

Recently, we were thrilled to announce the reunion of the original creators of Argo: Jesse, Alexander, and me. Since our launch, we have doubled our team size and plan to do so again in 2022.

The additional funds will enable us not only to launch the Akuity Platform but also make Argo even better. Open source is in our DNA and we are 100% committed to making Argo the most successful project for Kubernetes. The investments will allow us to scale the team and contribute more back to the community.

We are looking for talented, energetic team members who are passionate about open source, to work either remotely (as we grow, we will strive to become a remote-first company) or in the Bay Area. Please check out these roles and apply or reach out for more info.

Words of Gratitude

What motivates us the most is the trust our users, customers, and investors have put in Akuity and Argo. With every single milestone, we feel assured that the best is yet to come. We will do all that it takes to deliver the quality and accountability embedded in our mission of empowering DevOps teams with the best tools to deliver their apps in a simpler, safer, and faster way.

Another big shout-out goes to all the members of Argo open source community. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for your work and constant dedication to perfecting the developer experience provided by the Argo suite of tools. We can’t wait to see you all at Kubecon EU, ArgoCon, and Kubecon NA to meet the community in person and share the words of gratitude you all deserve.