Seattle startup Pulumi landed $41 million as it looks to boost its leadership position in the infrastructure as code market and invest in new AI-fueled products.
Madrona Venture Group, which led the company’s seed round in 2017, led the latest round. Other existing backers including Silicon Valley heavyweight NEA, Bellevue, Wash.-based Tola Capital, and San Francisco’s Strike Capital invested again.
The Series C round is a vote of confidence in Pulumi, which helps developers build underlying cloud computing infrastructure using general purpose languages such as JavaScript and Python. Its tools work across platforms and technologies including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes and others.
“It allows us to just continue doing what’s working really well with Pulumi in the market, but then expand and do even more,” Pulumi CEO Joe Duffy said of the fresh funding.
Pulumi has more than 2,000 customers, including more than half of the Fortune 50, and counts 150,000 users on its open-source platform. Revenue has doubled over the past year.
The infrastructure as code market is expected to reach $2.3 billion by 2027, according to a recent report.
“We have the best product,” Duffy said. “Customers tell us this all the time.”
But Pulumi sees more opportunity beyond its bread and butter.
The company began releasing new products last year with Pulumi Deployments, which helps run deployments remotely. This year it rolled out Pulumi Insights, which provides analytics and search capabilities across cloud infrastructure, and Pulumi AI, which generates infrastructure as code using natural language.
“The infrastructure as code building block allows us to build these new product experiences,” Duffy said. “They are explicitly targeting other problems that we see with our customers.”
Increasing use of artificial intelligence is a tailwind for Pulumi, given the cloud computing demands of AI. And Pulumi itself is using AI to bolster its own products.
“Companies are thinking about cloud infrastructure as a competitive advantage, not an afterthought or a cost center,” Duffy said. “And AI is really taking that to the next level.”
The company did not provide an updated valuation. Total funding to date is $99 million.
“There is a huge opportunity to build a durable, iconic company in Pulumi,” said S. “Soma” Somasegar, managing director at Madrona.
Pulumi recently hired longtime cloud industry leader Bob Laskey as chief customer officer. The company has more than 100 employees.
Duffy and co-founder Eric Rudder are former Microsoft engineering leaders. CTO Luke Hoban spent 12 years at Microsoft and more recently was at Amazon Web Services.
