Venture Capital

Coatue Leads $25 Million Series A in Kubecost

SAN FRANCISCOKubecost, an open source solution for monitoring, managing, and optimizing Kubernetes spend at scale, has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Coatue Management, with additional participation from existing investors First Round Capital and Afore Capital. In addition to the funding, lead investor David Cahn, Partner at Coatue, will join the Kubecost board of directors.

Kubecost angel investors include Snowflake CFO Michael Scarpelli and Looker co-founder Ben Porterfield. Leading companies using Kubecost include Adobe, Allianz, Capital One, and Under Armour.

“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.”

“As engineers ourselves, we wanted to build a product experience where you could install, use and, if desired, purchase software the way we wanted,” said 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 achieved rapid enterprise adoption, with the solution now managing more than $2 billion in Kubernetes spend and providing cost transparency and optimization to thousands of organizations.

Kubecost was founded by two former Google employees, Webb Brown and Ajay Tripathy, who spent four years each working on infrastructure monitoring solutions for Google infrastructure and Google Cloud.

“At Google, we were focused on the relationship between cost, performance, and health for internal Google services and external developers,” said 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.”