Kubernetes Cloud Spend Company Kubecost Raises $25M Series A Funding

kubecost
Kubecost was founded by CEO Webb Brown (photo: left) and CTO Ajay Tripathy (photo: right), two former Google employees who spent four years each working on infrastructure monitoring solutions for Google infrastructure and Google Cloud.

Kubecost, an open-source solution for monitoring, controlling, and optimizing Kubernetes spend at scale, has acquired $25 million in Series A investment headed by Coatue Management, with current investors First Round Capital and Afore Capital also participating.

Kubecost gives businesses the real-time cost visibility and information they need to keep track of and proactively cut their Kubernetes-related cloud expenditures. Users own and manage their data, and from a single window, they can see expenditure across different clusters. Through precise cost allocation breakdowns by parameters like as deployment, service, and namespace label, they can completely understand where expenditures arise.

Kubecost also provides unified cost monitoring, encompassing external cloud services and infrastructure, giving a clear view of where spending is going. The technology then allows businesses to act on cost optimization data and dynamic recommendations for increasing spend efficiency without affecting application performance. Kubecost also provides warnings and governance to enterprises, including real-time notifications that capture cost overruns and infrastructure outage threats before they become costly problems.

In addition to the funding, Kubecost’s principal investor, David Cahn, a partner at Coatue, will join the board of directors. Mr. Cahn’s prior investments include cloud-native companies Starburst, Snyk, and Databricks, as well as notable names in infrastructure and DevOps that went public (UiPath, Confluent, Snowflake, and Gitlab).

“We are excited to partner with Kubecost,” said David Cahn, a partner at Coatue. “We believe cloud costs are a growing priority for tech companies – and we think Kubecost has a unique combination of scaled developer adoption and usage at large enterprises. We’re looking forward to working with Webb and the team to make Kubecost the de-facto platform for developers.”

Former Google Cloud Employees

Snowflake CFO Michael Scarpelli and Looker co-founder Ben Porterfield are among Kubecost’s angel investors. Adobe, Allianz, Capital One, and Under Armour are among the firms that use Kubecost.

Webb Brown and Ajay Tripathy, two former Google workers, developed Kubecost after each spending four years working on infrastructure monitoring solutions for Google infrastructure and Google Cloud.

“A December 2021 survey from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) found there are now more than 5.5 million developers using Kubernetes, and this number is only expected to grow. We are committed to helping them optimize and use Kubernetes efficiently as they scale,” said Webb Brown, Co-Founder and CEO of Kubecost. “We’ve already built a vibrant, active open-source community around Kubecost and we ourselves are actively involved in the broader Kubernetes community, with more exciting contributions to come.”

Cloud Developers

“As engineers ourselves, we wanted to build a product experience where you could install, use and, if desired, purchase software the way we wanted,” added Mr. Brown. “We didn’t want developers to have to contact sales to get their hands on it. We didn’t want developers to share sensitive cloud spend data. We wanted them to have total control over their information. And we wanted developers to be able to install and even modify our software in minutes. We want everybody to have access to our software, no matter their budget.”

Kubecost has quickly gained enterprise acceptance, with the service now managing over $2 billion in Kubernetes expenditure and enabling cost transparency and optimization to thousands of businesses. According to a recent CNCF poll, Kubecost is the most often used tool for tracking Kubernetes expense across all major clouds and on-premises systems.

“At Google, we were focused on the relationship between cost, performance, and health for internal Google services and external developers,” added Mr. Brown. “We saw first-hand how intertwined the infrastructure, orchestration, and container layers were. Kubecost launched in early 2019, and we now have thousands of companies using our product. Developer and engineering teams appreciate our commitment to improving the developer experience, and to giving other enterprise stakeholders visibility and actionable controls over complex Kubernetes spend.”