The 10 Hottest DevOps Startups Of 2020 (So Far)

Here are 10 DevOps startups raising the bar in delivering technology enabling development and operations teams to work together at lightning speed.

In A Global Crisis, DevOps Delivers

See the latest entry: The 10 Hottest DevOps Startup Companies Of 2022

DevOps methodologies, and the collaborative tools that facilitate them, are critical to the success of digital transformation projects of the kind now being rapidly spurred by the coronavirus crisis.

The pandemic has pushed straggling enterprises to rapidly implement cloud-native transformation initiatives they once postponed. Massive workforce disruptions, office closures and distributed teams have brought into stark relief the benefits of automation and agility across the software lifecycle.

That dynamic is driving an until recently unexpected wave of new customers to innovative DevOps startups—opening those emerging companies up to new markets at unprecedented speed.

Here are 10 DevOps startups raising the bar in delivering technology enabling development and operations teams to work together at lightning speed, and likely to see their business surge as enterprises try to navigate the technological challenges of a global pandemic.

For more of the biggest startups, products and news stories of 2020, click here.

Chef

CEO: Barry Crist

A dozen years ago, Chef was among the first wave of innovative startups modernizing the process of provisioning infrastructure for an industry just starting to shift to cloud-native development methods and architectures.

A lot has changed since then, and the infrastructure-as-code pioneer has evolved in recent years, expanding its product lineup to focus on the broader “coded enterprise”—a term which encompasses infrastructure, security and compliance, and application lifecycle automation.

After transitioning from an open core model to a true open source one by eliminating the final proprietary pieces that often placed the company at odds with its partners, Chef launched its first formal channel program earlier this year.

The Chef Partner Program is designed to enable partners that want to leverage Chef’s open source solutions to deliver cloud automation services.

CircleCI

CEO: Jim Rose

Investors have been pouring money into CircleCI over the last year as the startup scales its popular CI/CD toolkit primarily delivered through a Software-as-a-Service model into international markets.

The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2011, and then merged with Distiller in 2014 to add continuous integration capabilities for mobile application developers. Since then, CircleCI has become a common fixture in cloud-native IT landscapes—used by some of the world’s largest enterprises as well as many Internet giants.

Two recent funding hauls—a $56 million round last July followed by a $100 million Series E round closed in April—are now fueling the addition of new capabilities, especially around change validation, which customers are increasingly demanding to enable rapid and effective code updates.

Cloudtamer.io

CEO: Brian Price

Tight synchronization of development and operations teams is often undermined by the imperative of ensuring compliance for each new software release.

Cloudtamer.io looks to knock down the governance roadblocks that sometimes limit the benefits of DevOps with a continuous compliance solution for workloads running across cloud providers.

By detecting, reporting and remediating policy violations, the startup based in Fulton, Md. Helps enable rapid and agile software development processes.

CTO.ai

CEO: Kyle Campbell

CTO.ai, a startup founded in 2017 in Vancouver, Canada, brings development tools into the highly collaborative realm of Slack channels to streamline DevOps processes.

The platform allows complex workflows to be shared from the Slack command line, an interface that can bridge development and operations teams. With that ‘SlackOps’ model, CTO.ai enables greater collaboration among distributed workforces.

Existing DevOps tools can plug directly into the platform, enabling automation across the DevOps cycle.

D2IQ

Co-CEOs: Tobi Knaup and Will Freiberg

After rebranding and executing a strategic shift, the company formerly called Mesosphere launched its first channel program at the end of last year to recruit more DevOps-focused consultancies tackling cloud-native modernization projects.

D2IQ, a San Francisco-based startup from the creators of the Mesos container orchestrator, transformed in 2019 to build on its core strength of helping organizations implement containerized architectures and big data workloads at scale. The name is spoken internally as "Day 2 IQ” to reflect focus on ongoing management of production deployments.

The startup shifted focus to Kubernetes as Mesos adoption waned in the face of industry standardization on the rival orchestrator, and recently introduced Ksphere, a stand-alone Kubernetes platform. But its flagship product, the Data Center Operating System, or DC/OS, integrates a variety of open-source container and big data technologies that online services providers and other large customers can easily deploy at scale.

GitLab

CEO: Sid Sijbrandij

GitLab was founded in 2013 as a provider of a web-based git repository. But in recent years the startup has added a plethora of new capabilities as part of a transformation into a full-lifecycle DevOps platform.

GitLab technology is now commonly implemented by large customers as part of their CI/CD pipelines and security processes.

With an end-to-end solution and an IPO outlook, the rapidly growing company rolled out its first formal channel program earlier this year to ramp engagement with resellers, services providers and ISVs.GitLab sees a massive opportunity for partners to convert more than 100,000 organizations using its open-source solutions in production to commercial customers. Partners can also benefit by extending the thousands of paying customers into new parts of the platform.

Harness

CEO: Jyoti Bansal

The San Francisco-based startup is bringing to the enterprise a continuous delivery technology incubated in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Harness.io recently bulked up its Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service platform with Continuous Efficiency, a new capability that provides DevOps teams direct visibility into the cost of each application and micro-service they run.

By integrating Continuous Efficiency into the Harness CD platform, customers benefit from greater awareness of how their cloud spend is allocated across the three leading hyper-scale clouds.

ShuttleOps

CEO: Damith Karunaratne

ShuttleOps, a startup founded last year in Ontario, Canada, has brought to market a visual DevOps platform that speeds application delivery by removing bottlenecks across that process.

The company delivers Application Release Orchestration (ARO) technology through a Software-as-a-Service model that automates the highly coordinated work of developers, infrastructure operators and security teams all contributing to continuous integration and delivery pipelines.

Earlier this year, ShuttleOps released a No-Code CI/CD solution that integrates technology from prominent DevOps tooling providers Chef, Docker and HashiCorp. The platform helps customers rapidly build, deploy and manage applications on the three leading hyper-scale cloud platforms.

Sysdig

CEO: Suresh Vasudevan

Demand for Sysdig’s security and compliance platform has been intensifying, and the startup founded in 2013 has been scaling operations and availability globally in preparation for its next growth spurt.

The Sysdig Secure DevOps Platform also enables organizations to monitor performance and capacity needs across Kubernetes-orchestrated container environments as they look to securely speed cloud-native transformation.

The San Francisco-based company kicked off the year with $70 million in new funding, which it is applying to expanding the business globally and accelerating an aggressive product roadmap.

A recent deal with IBM positioned Sysdig as the primary monitoring solution across IBM Cloud services.

Volterra

CEO: Ankur Singla

Volterra, a startup backed by some powerful strategic investors, looks to enable DevOps teams to tackle the operational, security and performance challenges of running apps across highly distributed cloud and edge environments.

By the time the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company emerged from stealth last November, it already had more than $50 million in funding, more than 100 engineers, and more than 30 customers.

Founded two years ago in Santa Clara, Calif., Volterra has released two products: VoltStack uses Kubernetes APIs to deploy and managed distributed applications across clouds, and VoltMesh adds high-performance networking and zero-trust security.

Those products create a unified multi-cloud and edge environment that accelerates delivery of SaaS, like the Office 365 productivity suite offered by Microsoft, one of the startup’s investors.