May 16, 2022

Akuity completed a $20 million (USD) Series A funding round. Lead Edge Capital and Akuity’s existing investor Decibel Partners led the financing that will allow the company to build the most advanced application delivery platform for Kubernetes, powered by the Argo Project.

Akuity Co-Founder and CEO Hong Wang, Co-Founder and CTO Jesse Suen and Co-Founder and Chief Architect Alexander Matyushentsev, are also the co-creators of the Argo Project, a suite of open source tools purpose-built for deploying and running applications and workloads on Kubernetes. According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) 2021 Annual Survey, production use of Argo has increased by 115% year-over-year as more developers began using it to enable continuous software delivery in their enterprise environments.

Nimay Mehta, Partner at Lead Edge Capital said, “Argo is purpose built to address the unique challenges faced when building and deploying Kubernetes applications. Evidenced by Argo’s rapid adoption and active open source community, it is clear that its suite of tools has won the hearts of developers. As the co-creators of Argo, the Akuity team is uniquely positioned to give enterprises the solutions they need to deploy at scale, and we’re thrilled to partner with them on the exciting opportunity ahead.”

Jon Sakoda, Founder at Decibel Partners added, “The founding team at Akuity has built an amazing community around the open source Argo project which has been widely embraced by engineering teams around the world. They have spent years helping the largest and most innovative companies leverage the power of Kubernetes and the cloud, and are committed to helping teams large and small unlock the speed and scalability of DevOps and GitOps. We are excited by their rapid growth and look forward to partnering with them in the years to come.”

Kubernetes and containerization have revolutionized cloud applications in a manner not seen since Linux and virtualization's disruption of the server market. But Wang，Suen, and Matyushentsev realized Kubernetes’ operational complexities require new approaches to how applications are managed, monitored, and deployed. They founded Akuity to help developers use the four Argo projects (Argo CD, Argo Rollouts, Argo Workflows, and Argo Events) to overcome these challenges of working in the cloud-native era.

“Argo will always remain an unencumbered open source project, but we realized it would benefit from commercial backing and a vendor to help take it to the next level,” said Wang. “The Akuity Platform will provide DevOps with battle-tested patterns packaged into a solution that delivers the best possible developer experience.”

“The additional funds will enable us not only to launch the Akuity Platform but also make Argo even better,” added Suen. “Open source is in our DNA and we are 100% committed to making Argo the most successful project for Kubernetes. We will use the Series A financing to scale the team and contribute even more to the community.”

Akuity is developing two commercial solutions:

Akuity Platform: A fully-managed DevOps platform powered by the Argo project which solves real-life enterprise use-cases and focuses on providing an exceptional developer experience. The Akuity Platform is currently available as a closed beta with general availability coming later this year.

Akuity Enterprise: The open source version of all four Argo projects backed by enterprise support and complemented with additional tools to make Argo even more useful and enterprise-ready. Akuity Enterprise is available today.