Sheila Gulati, Managing Director
Back in 2017 when we first saw Pulumi, we were incredibly excited to find that we shared a vision with Eric and Joe that all software was cloud software and that all cloud developers would become cloud developers. What was perhaps the more controversial part of the vision at that time was that many-cloud and multi-cloud would become dominant paradigms – Pulumi was prescient in that regard. With profound respect and empathy for the technical community, Eric and Joe recognized that developers need to work with the tools and languages they know best and that a well-structured open source community is critical to the success of any new offering for programmers.
Our original investment memo highlighted the strength of Pulumi’s value proposition:
Through an intuitive interface, Pulumi provides the automated mapping of application code to the appropriate infrastructure resources, removing the need for the developer to write many pages of additional code, often in a language that is not preferred or familiar. The vision for Pulumi is to provide for proactive and dynamic deployment of applications as applications are deployed across clouds and as environments shift and change.
As Pulumi has evolved, Infrastructure as Code has enabled modern application architecture and innovation. We have seen their vision fundamentally deliver as enterprises have widely adopted cloud computing and both many and multi-cloud architectures (Pulumi supports more than 150 clouds.) Pulumi has seen profound traction with developers (17K+ GH stars and counting) and remains committed to providing developers with an offering that delivers, “your cloud, your language, your way.”
As many and multi-cloud paradigms have evolved, unfortunately cloud complexity has evolved as well. Pulumi has worked tirelessly to tame this complexity and alleviate drudgery for developers. Developers are not a homogenous group of people, and have very different levels of experience and skill level. Pulumi has made the simple tasks simple, and the hard tasks possible!
For example, when an entry level developer joins a team, they often face an incredibly difficult onboarding process as they try to absorb the complexity of the infrastructure of their new organization while trying to contribute as quickly as possible. Where do they even start learning all there is to know and how do they become a productive team member quickly?
This brings us to the magic of AI and how incredibly important AI is for modern developers. AI will power the next wave of software development and Pulumi is at the forefront of removing the drudgery and complexity of provisioning infrastructure by adding the intelligence to see across clouds and provide key services for developers via Pulumi AI.
With fondness, we review our description from our first meeting: “Eventually Pulumi will be a virtual team member, the DevOps assistant.” Pulumi has fulfilled this vision more than we ever could have imagined at that time. We are excited to have backed Pulumi from Seed to Series C and continue to believe in their vision for the future of software development.