Pulumi raises $15M for its unique brand of infrastructure automation
Pulumi Corp., an infrastructure automation startup that launched in June with $5 million from investors, has bagged an additional $15 million round led by Madrona Venture Group.
The investment was announced today and saw Seattle-based enterprise technology fund Tola Capital chip in as well. Pulumi made the round public in conjunction with the introduction of a new commercial version of its namesake offering, which stands apart from other infrastructure automation tools.
Most solutions in this category come with their own platform-specific languages for writing automation scripts. Pulumi, in contrast, provides the ability to use mainstream programming languages such as Javascript and Python that many information technology professionals are already familiar with. The startup claims that its approach lowers the learning curve involved in automating a company’s infrastructure.
More notably, Pulumi promises to cut the amount of work necessary to create scripts. When the startup launched in June, Chief Executive Officer Joe Duffy shared an anecdote of how the platform allowed an engineer to automate an operational workflow with five times less code than Helm, a popular application management tool.
Duffy co-founded Pulumi in 2017 after a stint at Microsoft’s developer tools business. The CEO is credited with having played a key part in the technology giant’s move to open-source its .NET development framework. Duffy’s co-founder, Executive Chairman Eric Rudder, is in turn a former executive vice president at Microsoft who was at one point floated as a potential successor to Bill Gates.
The new $15 million round will boost Pulumi’s efforts to commercialize its technology. The paid offering that the startup introduced today, Team Edition, is a hosted version of its platform with extra features geared specifically toward enterprises. They include improved integration with third party-development services such as GitHub and a role-based access control mechanism for managing user access.
Pulumi will offer Team Edition alongside its existing, free Community Edition and the Pulumi SDK, which is open-source.
Photo: Pixabay
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