Kubecost Raises $25 Million Series A from Coatue to Optimize Cloud Spend by Empowering Millions of Kubernetes Developers Through Data

Kubecost to use funds to build a developer-centric community around its open source cost management solutions purpose-built for Kubernetes

Kubecost, an open source solution for monitoring, managing, and optimizing Kubernetes spend at scale, announced that it 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. Cahn’s previous investments include prominent names in infrastructure and DevOps who went on to go public (UiPath, Confluent, Snowflake, and Gitlab), as well as fellow cloud-native leaders Starburst, Snyk, and Databricks. 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.”

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“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. Another recent CNCF survey identified Kubecost as the most used tool for tracking Kubernetes spend across all major clouds or in on-prem environments. Kubecost has achieved widespread industry recognition, with analyst firm 451 Research publishing a recent report titled “Kubecost retains a laser focus on Kubernetes-native cost transparency and control” (subscription required). Its parent company, Stackwatch, was also recently named one of the “The 10 Hottest Kubernetes Startups Of 2021” by CRN.

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.

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“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.”

Kubecost provides organizations with the real-time cost visibility and insights required to continuously monitor and proactively reduce their Kubernetes-related cloud costs. Users own and control their data, and view spending across multiple clusters from a single pane of glass. They can fully understand exactly where expenses originate through granular cost allocation breakdowns by attributes including deployment, service, and namespace label. Kubecost also delivers unified cost monitoring for a complete picture of where expenses are going, including external cloud services and infrastructure. The solution then empowers organizations to take action with cost optimization insights with dynamic recommendations for improving spend efficiency without changing application performance. Kubecost also supports organizations with alerts and governance, including real-time notifications that catch cost overruns and infrastructure outage risks before they become costly issues.

“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.”

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