The Next Level - $7.5M Seed Round and Community Beta Launch

Today we are announcing the next level for CTO.ai with USD $7.5M in seed funding and the launch of our Community Beta.

When we first introduced The Ops Platform back in January, CTO.ai was already riding a tremendous wave of momentum. As an organization, we had made rapid progress in putting our team together, and were very excited to introduce our breakthrough solution — a CLI built from the ground up for development teams who want to automate, but don't have time in their product roadmap to invest. I promised that in the coming months, we would be demonstrating how our approach to Automation Intelligence accelerates the cadence of software delivery for our customers and gives them an unfair advantage over their competitors; and that we were looking for early adopters who wanted to build a developer operations success story of their own.

Since then the momentum has grown; we have taken steps to make our platform available and better understood by a growing community of early adopters. Today, we are excited to announce two critical milestones that will accelerate our progress even further and take CTO.ai to the next level: a new round of seed funding and the Community Beta release of The Ops Platform.

A New Round of Seed Funding

We are proud to receive $7.5 million in seed funding from a distinguished group of investors led by Tiger Global and Slack Fund, along with participation from Yaletown Partners, Pallasite Ventures, Panache Ventures, and Jonathan Bixby. We will use this new funding to expand The Ops Platform and to hire key strategic roles in engineering, product, marketing, and sales. This funding puts us on course to achieve our mission; transforming how companies manage DevOps to improve the developer experience. We believe the success of a technology-driven organization is in the hands of its development teams, and that automating important workflows can radically change the growth trajectory of every software company; we’re determined to accelerate our mission to enable $100 billion of developer productivity by 2030.

You can read the full announcement about the new funding round here.

Read the TechCrunch article here.

We’re Ready for a Community Beta!

With the release of this Community Beta, we are bringing a modular automation experience to a broader group of developers than ever before. We have been working hard to expand on features that make it easy for your development team to implement a custom developer experience.

Let’s take a look at what’s new in the Community Beta.

Teams

The number one requested feature during the limited beta was the ability to create private collaborative workspaces on The Ops Platform. With Teams, organizations can now build, share and publish Ops privately, enabling the standardization of DevOps practices without sacrificing customization or incurring expensive and time-intensive overhead. When we said Ops was the CLI for teams, we meant it. The new Teams feature is our answer to the complexity that developers face in order to operationalize internal process.

Workflows

Another widely requested feature was the ability to string together Command Ops to automate operational tasks with multiple steps, we call this feature Ops Workflows. Workflows open up new opportunities where any developer can combine Ops written by them, their Team, or the community and chain them together. Very soon we will be releasing some major upgrades to Workflows which will allow them to run via Slack, which means you can trigger Workflows from anywhere. Sign up here for early access.

Community Registry

At our core the Community Registry allows developers and developer Teams to discover and share Ops. As new Ops are posted publicly, they’ll be made available to promote collaborative problem solving and connectivity across the developer community.

We've also had a number of new Ops published to the registry recently…

github - We've gone ahead and released a Github Ops that gives you a seamless CLI experience for working with repos, labels, issues and pull requests. Easily create a repo, list and start work on issues or pull requests or create and synchronize labels from other Github repos. We're working on even more features so check back often as we'll be open sourcing this code under an MIT license.

aws - We're big fans of the AWS CLI, but it has so many commands that honestly it can be hard to remember how to interact with it. We decided to enhance the CLI experience for AWS by integrating it into The Ops Platform to give developers an interactive and guided experience for interfacing with AWS.

k8s - We've seen how complicated it can be for development teams to get started with Kubernetes, so we've created and published a Command for provisioning a fully stacked Kubernetes cluster on AWS. We're in the process of also unlocking EKS as well as container services on GCP and Azure, coming soon.

What DevOps tasks would you like to see automated? Tell us.

Meet the destination for DevOps ‘EasyButtons’: CTO.ai

CTO.ai’s Ops Platform serves as a secret weapon for both developers and businesses alike. It gives engineering teams the ability to access and share shortcuts that act as an ‘EasyButton’ for DevOps with a way to customize and automate repeatable tasks with ease. Using a registry of shortcuts, engineering teams can standardize DevOps workflows across their entire organization, a pain point that resonates with startups and large enterprises alike. As an example, junior devs with little training on Kubernetes can deploy a cluster in 15 minutes versus days, and tedious tasks like running reports can be reduced from as many as 100 steps down to 10.

We'll be uploading videos showing each of these Ops soon. Each one will also be released under an open source MIT license on our Github, so we really hope you will clone them and maybe even contribute a pull request back!

Stay tuned for many many more community Ops in the coming months.

Thanks!

That's it for this update but we have a whole lot more coming soon.

We'll be very active at many developer conferences in Q4 2019, including; Web Summit, Github Universe, DevOps Enterprise Summit, KubeCon & AWS Re:Invent. If you are attending any of these conferences, let us know and we'd love to sit down and talk DevOps Automation Intelligence with you.

#DevOpsHero