Loft Labs—the creators of vCluster and DevPod—announced $24 million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures. Existing investors Fusion Fund, Surface Ventures, Emergent Ventures, and Berkeley SkyDeck Fund participated. Kit Merker, one of the first product managers for Kubernetes at Google, made an additional angel investment. This new funding round brings Loft’s total financing to $28.6 million.
Loft has seen strong momentum and passed multiple milestones in the past year, including 4.6x ARR growth; vCluster surpassing 40 million image pulls; the introduction of vCluster Pro, the commercial edition of vCluster; and the development and launch of DevPod, an open-source project that enables engineers to codify reusable dev environments for any infrastructure. The company also announced integrations with Rancher, HashiCorp Vault, and Argo CD and signed several new customers, including CoreWeave, Outreach, Lintasarta, Aussie Broadband, and five Global Fortune 500 companies.
The company also expanded its headcount by over 50% in the past 12 months. This strategic scaling most recently led the company to hire Denise Schannon as VP of Engineering. She brings a wealth of experience from her tenure as Senior Director of Engineering at SUSE and as one of the earliest employees at Rancher Labs.
Loft Labs offers the building blocks that enable developers to solve their hardest challenges. Some of these challenges include simplifying complex AI infrastructure deployment, streamlining multi-cloud management, reducing infrastructure costs, and demystifying Kubernetes management. By addressing these challenges, Loft Labs empowers developers and platform engineers to overcome some of the most significant barriers to innovation and efficiency in today’s technology landscape.
KEY QUOTE:
“Our growing customer base is using vCluster and DevPod to increase reliability, streamline engineering workflows, and lower costs. Our focus has always been to create things for platform builders, and we are only at the beginning. Efficient Kubernetes multi-tenancy with vCluster and consistent dev environments with DevPod are just the first top-of-mind challenges we wanted to solve for platform teams. We see so many opportunities for additional next-generation building blocks for platform engineers, and we’re excited to innovate in these areas. With Khosla Ventures as the first institutional investor in companies like Open AI and Gitlab, we are grateful to partner with a VC that truly understands our space and we also greatly appreciate the continued support and encouragement from our seed investors.”
– Lukas Gentele, co-founder and CEO of Loft Labs
“Every new level of virtualization has historically created incredible value for enterprises and completely changed the way devs and ops teams deploy infrastructure. Loft has created that next level of faster and simpler virtualization with vCluster, an open source virtualized k8s cluster that will finally deliver what was promised to us over a decade ago: portable, multi-cloud clusters that free enterprises from vendor lock-in.”
– Jon Chu, partner at Khosla Ventures
