Garden.io, an end-to-end devops platform for Kubernetes and containers, raises $16M

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Garden.io, a cloud development and testing platform for Kubernetes and container environments, has raised $16 million in a series A round of funding.

While it’s difficult to overstate the significance of the cloud in today’s technological landscape, managing and running modern cloud systems is a complex process. With technical talent already at a premium, a company’s developers might not have the skill set required to manage a cloud environment confidently in its entirety, while testing to verify the impact of any changes they make comes with its own set of challenges. This is where Garden.io enters the fray.

Founded in 2018, Garden.io targets developer operations (devops) teams with an end-to-end development and testing platform that builds entire systems and spins up production-like environments from scratch. Using a graph-based framework, Garden.io helps companies “deliver faster to the cloud,” by automating builds, deployments, and tests.

“It allows developers to quickly see results as they work, to preview changes for their team, and run automated tests, all in one setup,” Garden.io founder and CEO Jon Edvald told VentureBeat. “It is unique in that it works the same way from developers’ laptops and in [continuous integration and continuous deployment] CI/CD automation, and accelerates both.”

The Garden.io platform is designed to replace local development tools such as Docker Compose, while complementing CI/CD platforms to lift chunks of the complexity out of CI pipelines and home-grown scripts — it’s all about “putting that au tomation at developers’ fingertips,” according to Edvald.

Ultimately, Garden.io promises to save cloud developers time, which is particularly important when their time is already a precious commodity. According to Garden.io, cloud developers today spend on average just 11% of their time writing code, with as much as 16 hours per week spent on maintaining internal tooling, debugging pipelines, and setting up development environments.

The open source factor

The base Garden.io platform is an open source product (available under a “copyleft” Mozilla Public License 2.0 license), which includes the core framework and a CLI (command line interface) tool for development, testing, and CI automation.

“Open source has, to a degree, become table stakes in devops, which is understandable because it’s so tightly embedded in teams’ workflows, and companies want to retain a degree of control,” Edvald explained. “For us, it’s also a means to accept user contributions, which is crucial because this is an ever-evolving complex problem to solve, and user needs are inevitably diverse.

On top of that, Garden.io also offers a fully managed and hosted cloud offering, and an enterprise-grade incarnation that can be self-hosted or deployed as a single-tenant version of the cloud product.

The Berlin, Germany-based company has already amassed an impressive roster of companies ahead of its formal launch today, from small five-person businesses to Fortune 500 firms, though the company wasn’t at liberty to divulge any of the latter — it did confirm, however, that its customer-base include scale-ups such as Minted and Reprise.

“We’ve been delighted to see companies of all sizes use Garden in much the same way, but our ideal profile today is high-growth scale-ups,” Edvald said. “These tend to have high-urgency as they outgrow their — usually home-made — internal tools, and can make decisions fast.”

At launch, Garden.io is largely focused on Kubernetes and containers, with support for infrastrucutre-as-a-code platforms such as Terraform and Pulumi. With $16 million in the bank, though, the company is well-financed to build out support for other third-party products including serverless platforms, and it’s also planning to build integrations for security tools such as Snyk.

Garden.io’s series A round was co-led by Sorenson Ventures and 468 Capital, with participation from Crowberry Capital, Fly Ventures, among others.