Posted on February 23, 2022

Okteto Raises a $15M Series A To Disrupt How Software Teams Develop Modern Applications

We are excited to announce that Okteto has raised $15M in Series A financing. The round was led by Villi Iltchev from Two Sigma Ventures, with participation from existing investors Haystack, Root Ventures, and Uncorrelated Ventures.

The round also included investments from some of the world's leading founders and operators of Developer Tools, including John Kodumal, Founder and CTO of LaunchDarkly; Grant Miller & Marc Campbell, founders of Replicated, Dan Pinto, Founder and CEO of FingerprintJS; Erica Brescia, Founder of Bitnami and former GitHub COO; Florian Leibert, Founder of Mesosphere; Taimur Rashid, Chief BD at Redis; Jono Bacon, Community Strategist; and others.

Today’s State of Development

For the past 15 years, application architecture has changed dramatically. We went from monoliths on physical servers hosted in basements to microservices running on distributed containers worldwide.

While innovation has boomed in DevOps and deployment solutions, software development has remained stagnant: developers are still trying to make their machines look like clusters by manually spinning up a "dev" version of their application and writing code against that. But the "dev" version is nothing like production, so developers are then forced to wait for endless CI cycles, or worse yet, for their turn on a shared staging environment before they know if their changes truly work. That was almost tolerable when the entire application was a single binary, but not in a world of highly distributed applications.

Not only is the state of development slow, lengthy, and increasingly complex, it’s costing development teams hours of tedious work and lost productivity. Developers want to innovate and build cool products, and businesses want to ship value to their customers quickly.

Why We Started Okteto

Today, business and engineering teams are building next-generation cloud-native applications. Yet the development process has not adopted next-generation cloud-native tools. This formula isn't right. This lack of development-focused innovation drove Pablo, Ramon, and I to quit our jobs and join the Y Combinator Winter 2019 batch. We quickly started working towards the vision of revolutionizing how software teams develop modern applications.

In short, we really need to say goodbye to the days where developers spend hours of their day waiting for containers, builds, and deployments.

Remote Development Environments for Everyone

Today, leading tech companies like Monday.com, LaunchDarkly, Replicated, Privacy Dynamics, Sirona Medical, Dafiti, and many more are already using Okteto remote development and preview environments every day to develop amazing experiences for their customers.

With the Okteto platform, teams of all sizes can deploy pre-configured environments in the cloud in seconds. This enables developers to instantly work with their existing application stack and see their code changes live on the cloud, as they would look in production, as soon as they hit save.

With this workflow, developers can now:

break away from limited resources available on their machines
avoid manual or shared dev environments
unlock insanely fast feedback loops
ship value faster with increased replicability and confidence

“After adopting Okteto and remote development environments, the engineering productivity increase has been huge for the Engineering R&D team at Monday.com. Developers no longer spend extra time on handling environment setup and can work on what really matters which is building the product itself.”

Lior Rabin, Engineering Manager, Monday.com

The future of development is not on a local machine. It’s in the cloud with remote development environments at the core. If you recognize the lack of productivity stemming from the traditional, tedious workflow of application development, you and your engineering team are ready to join us. We would love to help you and your team transform your software development process. Reach out!

We Are Hiring

What started as an open-source project in 2019, is now a world-class team of 17 experts in dev tools working alongside a global community of thousands of developers to improve application development. And we're only beginning to scratch the surface of what's possible with remote development environments.

Now is the time to spread the word and bring remote development environments to the forefront. Over the next several months, we'll be hiring talent across Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Engineering to bring the vision to life.

We are a fully remote and global company (we don't even have an office). Join us! You can find our open positions here.

In addition to expanding the team, we're beyond excited to partner with Villi and Two Sigma Ventures as partners for this next phase of the Okteto journey. We're convinced that Villi's experience with category-defining companies like Gitlab and Remote.com will support us in building an even more amazing community and product.

This funding milestone would not be possible without the support of our community, customers, and partners. Thank you all for believing and supporting us!