Release your Ideas with Environments as a Service. Fueled by a Seed Round from Sequoia.

Today we are super excited to announce our $2.7M Seed round led by Sequoia Capital. You can read the details of the round in our press release.

Our mission at Release is to help great ideas get to the world quickly. Over the 20 years of our careers in technology we’ve seen the evolution of building software on physical servers that we racked and stacked ourselves to today’s world of building on the cloud. One thing in that timeframe has remained consistent: delivering software isn’t getting any easier.

Before a software developer’s code can be released to the world it has to be deployed to an environment. Development, staging, and production environments are a critical step to releasing code. These highly complex platforms are built with dozens or hundreds of services, cloud platforms, and supporting technologies. They are so complex that standing up a new environment is a dedicated job for DevOps engineers, some of the most capable and in-demand technical talent in any organization. Environments thus become the biggest and most costly bottleneck in software development.

There are more than 21 million developers worldwide and they all use environments, but only one engineer at a time can deploy to an environment. Developers can wait days or weeks to deploy their code due to constraints on single environments. This leads to long queues, idle engineers, and delayed releases costing organizations tens of millions of dollars per year, something we estimate to be more than $45B per year to manage and maintain environments.

With each technical advancement we’ve seen the possibilities of what we can do with software expand. With these advancements, the complexity of our systems are also advancing. Modern applications are anything but simple. Software today is more complex than ever with all of the tools, clouds, services, and interconnectivity at our disposal.

This complexity means getting your ideas from your fingertips to users has become even harder than it was 20 years ago. While we aren’t fighting with racking and stacking hardware and freezing in a data center, we are now dealing with the ever growing complexity of our applications and our environments.

There was a moment in the early 2000’s when the complexity was embedded within the operating system. Distributed services across the cloud has become our operating system and it feels like the early 2000’s again. Something is needed that virtualizes this complexity much like the VM virtualized the operating system back then.

Environments are the manifestation of your application running within this complex technical ecosystem. All the great ideas delivered with software run in environments and we have big plans on how making environments easy to reproduce will get these ideas to the world faster and easier.

Release can:

• Help you streamline development and remove bottlenecks in your development process with ephemeral environments, test and QA environments, as well as staging environments that can be created on-demand.
• Deliver an amazing developer experience to get your code from your mind to production. We’ve been told this is a Heroku-like experience delivered on Kubernetes in your cloud. 
• Deliver your B2B application into your customers’ cloud VPC environments

This is just the beginning of what can be done when your environments can easily be reproduced, created and delivered on-demand.

We’re proud to have Sequoia as our partner in this journey. They’ve consistently been a part of the biggest ideas and greatest companies that have ever been built. We’re especially excited to be working with Bogomil Balkansky who spent many years at VMWare thinking about how to deliver simplicity to developers and companies.

I also want to thank our team for all of their hard work since we founded the company. They have made this possible and their energy, enthusiasm, and dedication has made building this company an absolute joy. I know we’re at the starting line but sometimes even getting to the starting line is a journey and this team is the best group of people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. If you’re interested in helping us on our mission, we always post new roles here: https://release.com/company.

If you’re interested in seeing how Release Environments as a Service (EaaS) can help you and your team get your ideas to the world faster, drop us a line at hello@release.com and we’d love to show you what the future of software development looks like.