Sequoia leads $2.7M Seed Round to Launch Release, Environments-as-a-Service

SAN FRANCISCO - Release, maker of Environments-as-a-Service, today announced a seed round of $2.7 million led by Sequoia, with participation from Y Combinator, Rogue VC, Liquid Capital, and other angel investors. Release is also announcing general availability of its Environments-as-a-Service platform, which allows organizations to quickly and easily deploy, manage, and reproduce production-replica environments. Customers use Release to remove environment bottlenecks in software delivery, deliver on-demand sales demo environments, and deliver production environments and SaaS solutions into their customer’s virtual private clouds.

Environments are one of the greatest bottlenecks for software development, causing developers to sit idle and release dates to slip. Software organizations don’t provision enough environments because they are complex to stand up and costly to maintain. Release lets developers easily create reproducible environments that are exact replicas of the production environment.

These environments run on Kubernetes in the software developer’s cloud account and have access to all of the developer’s cloud native services. Release environments can be created on-demand, through a command line interface, with a pull request or via an API to allow for easy integration with existing CI/CD solutions.

"One of the most pervasive problems in software development is that development and production environments are never the same. Access to multiple pre-production environments that are precise replicas of production is a critical facilitator of collaboration between teams, yet managing numerous environments is so time consuming that companies ration access,” said Bogomil Balkansky, partner at Sequoia. “Release removes these pain points with its Environments-as-a-Service platform, which makes the software development process more efficient.”

Release was founded by Tommy McClung, Erik Landerholm and David Giffin, who led the technology team at an ecommerce company where they led the companywide effort to remove environment bottlenecks. There were no commercial solutions at the time so the founders built their own environment bottleneck solution and soon after launched Release to commercialize Environments-as-a-Service.

"As modern cloud-based applications have become more complex with microservices and an ever growing arsenal of cloud services, it has become incredibly difficult for teams to create and maintain numerous environments," said McClung, Release CEO. “We are transforming environments from an organizational headache into a one-click convenience.”

Datasaur, an artificial intelligence technology company, started using Release to accelerate software development and testing, as well as reduce bottlenecks in pre-production development. The company needed to quickly scale and used Release to power its production environments. Release provided the power of Kubernetes without having to invest in a lengthy and costly Kubernetes migration.

“Release enables Datasaur to focus on building applications without requiring a complex environment management infrastructure,” said Ivan Lee, Datasaur founder and CEO. “This has improved the efficiency of launching our services for the Datasaur community and added capabilities that have allowed us to handle our rapid growth.”