The 10 Hottest DevOps Startups Of 2022 (So Far)
CodeSee, LinearB and Mondoo are just some of the DevOps startups that have made CRN’s list.
A tool to provide maps and visualizations of code; a platform for tracking planning accuracy and code quality; and a startup promising ways to find and fix infrastructure throughout the development lifecycle to improve security are among the hottest development operations startups CRN has seen so far in 2022.
See the latest entry: The 10 Hottest DevOps Startup Companies Of 2022
CodeSee, LinearB and Mondoo are just some of the DevOps startups that have made CRN’s list. Multiple startups in the DevOps space are marketing their products as ways to increase efficiency, save on time and cost and make life easier for developers.
These tools could appeal to companies hit by the IT talent shortage and preparing for record-high inflation in the U.S. and the potential for a recession in the future.
[RELATED: THE 10 HOTTEST SAAS STARTUPS OF 2022 (SO FAR)]
What DevOps Startups Made CRN’s List?
The following companies are on CRN’s list:
Read more about how these startups made it to CRN’s 10 Hottest DevOps Startups Of 2022 (So Far).
Architect.io
CEO: David Thor
Headquarters: Boston
Website: architect.io
Architect.io provides an architecture-as-code framework and cloud platform that promises to automate different DevOps tools and practices.
The Boston-based startup has a platform with capabilities around container delivery, external dependency resolution and injection, recursive provisioning and other actions, according to Architect. The platform can automatically generate strict network policies with each deployment for network security.
In February, Architect raised a $5 million seed round, according to the startup. Next Coast Ventures led the round, which included Abstraction Capital, Spike Ventures and angel investors Jean Sini, JJ Fliegelman, Chris Nguyen, and Marc Chenn. Previous investors NextGen Venture Partners and Comcast Ventures also participated.
Architect is using the money for developer relations, go-to-market functions and engineering efforts, according to the company.
Before CEO David Thor co-founded Architect in 2019, he worked at Facebook for about a year as a software engineer, according to his LinkedIn account. He came to Facebook through the 2018 acquisition of Confirm.io, where he had worked for more than two years in engineering.
Thor came to Confirm.io in 2015 through the acquisition of software consulting firm Arcus Solutions, according to his LinkedIn. He had been at Arcus for more than two years and held the title of managing director.
CodeSee
CEO: Shanea Leven
Headquarters: San Francisco
Website: codesee.io
CodeSee provides a platform that visualizes, detects and automates code for development teams to save time and money on onboarding, code reviews, quality and compliance.
Users of the San Francisco-based startups’ “maps” include Salesforce, Snyk, CircleCI and Discovery, according to CodeSee. CodeSee maps are meant for companies with as few as 10 employees to companies with thousands of employees. The startup was founded in 2019.
In January, CodeSee raised $7 million in an add-on seed round of funding. The round was led by Wellington Access Ventures, Plexo Capital and existing investors. Former Heroku CEO Adam Gross, former Square and Intel Chief Security Officer Window Snyder and other angel investors participated.
CodeSee will use the money for new maps features and adding to offerings for enterprises and teams.
Before founding CodeSee in 2019, CEO Shanea Leven was head of product management at Lob, according to her LinkedIn account. She left Lob after less than a year in 2020.
Leven also previously served as senior director of product management at Docker for less than a year, according to her LinkedIn. At Docker, she led “the company product strategy for Docker Hub (public saas container registry platform), Docker Trusted Registry (enterprise registry platform) and Identity platform.”
She left Cloudflare in 2019 with the title of director of product management and eBay in 2018 with the title of senior technical product manager, according to her LinkedIn.
Leven worked at Google for more than four years, leaving the company in 2017 with the title of product and program manager. At Google, she “worked on both the consumer/partner experience and the developer experience” for Google Assistant transactions, according to her LinkedIn account.
DuploCloud
CEO: Venkat Thiruvengadam
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
Website: duplocloud.com
No-code, low-code self-service cloud infrastructure automation for developers is the promise of DuploCloud’s platform.
This San Jose, Calif.-based startup aims to save time and manpower with automated provisioning and orchestration across network, compute, storage, containers and cloud native services, along with native integration into security operations (SecOps) workflows.
DuploCloud has had more than 3 million self-service deployments and more than 500 cloud integrations, according to the company. It is also an Amazon Web Services partner.
In February, DuploCloud closed a $15 million Series A round of funding, according to the company. Mayfield led the round, with existing investor Monta Vista Capital participating.
Before he founded the company in 2018, CEO Venkat Thiruvengadam worked at Zenefits for about two years, according to his LinkedIn account. He left with the title of principal engineer.
His resume includes more than seven years with Microsoft, according to Thiruvengadam’s LinkedIn account. He left Microsoft in 2013 with the title of senior software engineer in Windows Azure Networking.
At Microsoft, he was “one of the two founders of Windows Azure Networking Team in 2008,” according to his LinkedIn. He “architected and implemented significant parts of Azure‘s SDN controller, hypervisor agents with substantial contributions to Azure’s compute infrastructure.”
Esper
CEO: Yadhu Gopalan
Headquarters: Bellevue, Wash.
Website: esper.io
DevOps for devices is how Esper markets its cloud platform for dedicated device fleets, giving users the ability to deploy, update and manage fleets.
Customers can use Bellevue, Wash.-based Esper for self-service kiosks in restaurants, points-of-sale in stores, rugged hardware in manufacturing facilities and other use cases, according to the company.
Esper also has a partner program for resellers, managed service providers, independent software vendors and original equipment manufacturers, according to the startup. Reseller partners include NowMicro and TroyMobility. OEM partners include Lenovo and Panasonic.
In October, Esper raised a $60 million Series C round of funding. Insight Partners led the round. Existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Madrona Ventures and Root Ventures.
Before CEO Yadhu Gopalan co-founded Esper in 2018, he worked at Amazon for more than five years, according to his LinkedIn account.
Insightly Analytics
CEO: Sudheer Bandaru
Headquarters: San Francisco
Website: insightly.ai
Insightly Analytics wants to automate the process of analyzing data from Git and Jira to determine the efficiency and performance of developer teams.
The San Francisco-based startup believes its insights can help executives understand a team’s velocity, according to Insightly. Managers can use the tools to find bottlenecks quickly. And engineers can use the tool for asynchronous collaboration through an integration with Slack.
Insightly says that customers have used its tools to increase release speed, increase the throughput of teams and reduce the number of production bugs, according to the startup.
In July, Insightly CEO Sudheer Bandaru took to LinkedIn to announce a $1 million seed round the startup raised. Together led the round with participation from various angel investors.
Before he founded Insightly, Bandaru worked at Shortlist Professionals for more than six years, according to his LinkedIn account. In November, he left his job as the company’s chief technology officer to take a part time advisory role.
During his time at Shortlist, he “built the complete tech team and developed multiple products to help find dream careers for over 1000+ professionals across India, Africa and 20+ countries in companies like Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Bain & Company, DHL, ITC Limited, Uber Eats, and Shell India,” according to his Linkedin.
Bandaru previously worked at Bankrate for more than four years, according to his LinkedIn. He left the company in 2015 with the title of director of engineering. During his time at Bankrate, he oversaw “strategy, execution, and delivery across B2B and B2C products including 1500+ consumer-facing domains” and “managed multiple teams across locations in US and India consisting of product, design, engineering and data analytics teams to serve over 1MM monthly unique customers generating over $30MM per year in revenue.”
LinearB
CEO: Ori Keren
Headquarters: Los Angeles
Website: linearb.io
In the past year, LinearB has grown the number of development teams using its tools for engineering analytics and workflow optimization from 1,500 to 5,000.
Users include Bumble, BigID and Cloudinary, totaling more than 100,000 developers, according to the startup, which has offices in Los Angeles and Israel.
LinearB supplies users with a project delivery tracker to determine planning accuracy, tools for measuring the quality of projects’ code and the integrity of data, and it works with data across Jira, Slack, GitHub, GitLab, Microsoft Teams and other popular applications, according to the company.
In May, LinearB raised $50 million in a Series B round of financing, according to the company. Tribe Capital led the round. The venture capital wing of Salesforce and existing investors Battery Ventures and 83North participated.
Before he co-founded LinearB in 2018, CEO Ori Keren worked at Cisco. He left Cisco with the title of vice president of advanced development, according to his Linkedin. He came to Cisco through the 2016 acquisition of Cloudlock for $293 million.
Modular
CEO: Chris Lattner
Headquarters: Los Altos, Calif.
Website: modular.com
Modular was only founded this year, but an impressive $30 million funding round and the resumes of its co-founders make this startup a company to watch.
In June, Modular announced it raised a $30 million round of funding to invest toward an artificial intelligence (AI) developer platform that brings together popular AI framework frontends and enhances access and portability to various hardware backends and cloud environments.
An article from TechCrunch on the round said that Modular wants to do for machine learning operations (MLOps) what DevOps did for software.
GV (formerly Google Ventures), Greylock, Factory and SV Angel participated in the round, according to Modular.
The goal is developer workflow tooling that is more expressive, usable, debuggable, reliant, performant and scalable, according to Modular. The result should be quicker time to market for customers.
CEO Chris Lattner co-founded Modular in January with Chief Product Officer Tim Davis. Lattner founded the LLVM *infrastructure used for optimizing compilers, which got him an engineering job at Apple in 2005. He left Apple in 2017 with the title of senior director of the developer tools department, according to his LinkedIn account.
In that role, Lattner “led the developer tools department at Apple (~200 people) which was responsible for Swift, Xcode, Swift Playgrounds, Instruments, CPU and GPU compilers, low-level tools, and other miscellanea,” according to his LinkedIn account. “These tools are used pervasively both within Apple, but also by 3rd party developers targeting iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS.”
Lattner worked at Google for more than two years, leaving in 2020. At Google, he “led the TensorFlow Infrastructure team, including compiler and runtime support for CPUs, GPUs, and TPUs (Tensor Processing Unit) accelerators,” according to his LinkedIn.
He also worked at SiFive for more than two years, leaving this year with the title of president of engineering and product, according to Lattner’s LinkedIn.
His co-founder, Davis, left a nearly six-year career at Google to start Modular. In his most recent role, Davis led “product for Google ML APIs (Tensorflow, JAX), Compilers (XLA & MLIR) and Runtime infrastructure for Server,” according to his LinkedIn. He also led “Google’s On-Device ML infrastructure and computing” and machine learning “execution on our CPU, GPU and TPU infrastructure (MLIR & XLA).”
Davis arrived at Google with the 2016 acquisition of Fluc, an online food ordering marketplace he founded three years earlier, according to his LinkedIn.
Mondoo
CEO: Soo Choi-Andrews
Headquarters: San Francisco
Website: mondoo.com
Mondoo offers a security and compliance platform aimed at development operations teams.
The platform is meant for finding and fixing infrastructure throughout the development lifecycle, promising the ability to discover misconfigurations in real time, build security into every phase of software development and automate manual security processes to bring DevOps and security teams together, according to Mondoo.
Mondoo works with public clouds, private clouds, Kubernetes, containers, servers, endpoints, software supply chain and other business-critical infrastructure, according to the startup. It works with Terraform, Packer, Docker and other tools.
It appears that the startup has put the $12 million it raised in a Series A round of funding in October to work. Product updates since then include new Kubernetes pod scanning, support for Microsoft Azure Pipelines and Jenkins, new GitHub resource capabilities and Amazon Web Services cross-organization queries.
Before she co-founded Mondoo in 2020, CEO Soo Choi-Andrews worked at Google for more than two years, leaving the company in 2021, according to her LinkedIn.
She previously worked at Chef Software for more than three years, leaving the company with the title of senior product manager, according to her LinkedIn. At Cheg, she was “responsible for the product engineering launch of AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate into the Marketplace to expand Chef‘s cloud power play.”
ReadySet
CEO: Alana Marzoev
Headquarters: Beverly Hills, Calif.
Website: readyset.io
ReadySet provides developers with a SQL caching engine for building performant, real-time applications without code changes or switching databases.
The engine aims to ease developers’ difficulties with large datasets, high request volumes or complicated queries, according to ReadySet.
In April, ReadySet raised a $24 million Series A round of funding. Index Ventures led the round. Amplify Partners and angel investors Guillermo Rauch, Spencer Kimball, Adam Gross, Jason Warner and Yury Izrailevsky participated, according to the company.
ReadySet will use the money toward expanding the team, according to the company.
In June, the company released a free version called ReadySet Core, which runs from laptops to any cloud provider on as many nodes as desired.
Before she co-founded ReadySet in 2020, CEO Alana Marzoev contributed toward the open research project Noria as part of her doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Before enrolling as a Ph.D. student at MIT, Marzoev worked at Microsoft for about a year, according to her LinkedIn. She worked on cloud infrastructure research.
Slim.AI
CEO: John Amaral
Headquarters: Boxborough, Mass.
Website: slim.ai
Founded just last year, Slim.AI has already attracted investor attention for its developer platform built on the DockerSlim open-source project for cloud-native application development.
In January, Boxborough, Mass.-based Slim.AI raised a $31 million Series A round of financing. Insight Partners and StepStone Group co-led the round. Boldstart Ventures, Decibel Partners, FXP, Knollwood and TechAviv Founder Partners participated, according to Slim.
The company tries to go beyond making slimmer containers to deliver a container-based workflow platform for small and large organizations. Developers can use the platform to ship secure, production-ready containers in a repeatable way with transparency.
The practice helps not only with DevOps, but the security of the software supply chain as well, minimizing an application’s attack surface, according to the company.
Before he co-founded Slim, CEO John Amaral worked at Cisco for more than three years. He left the company in 2020 with the title of head of product for Cisco Cloud Security, according to his LinkedIn account.
Amaral came to Cisco in 2016 through the $293 million acquisition of CloudLock, where he had served as head of product for about a year, according to his LinkedIn account.
He worked at Trustwave for more than six years, leaving the company in 2015 with the title of senior vice president of product, according to his LinkedIn.