Pulumi Corp. today said that it has raised $37.5 million from investors to expand the user base and capabilities of its infrastructure-as-code platform, which enables companies to automate the management of their cloud environments.

The startup’s platform is already logging more than a million downloads per month. 

Deploying an enterprise application on a cloud platform involves a lot of steps. Information technology teams must provision infrastructure resources, configure them, define security rules and set up their application’s individual components. Instead of performing all these steps manually, IT teams are increasingly writing code to handle the process because it’s faster and allows the workflow to be standardized in a reusable script.

Pulumi has put a new spin on the concept. Other infrastructure automation solutions often require users to write their scripts in a niche programming language specific to one particular tool, which creates a learning curve. Pulumi’s platform, in contrast, allows developers to harness standard programming languages such as Python to manage infrastructure.

It’s a big upgrade over the traditional approach, Pulumi argues. Popular languages such as Python have code constructs that make programming easier and often aren’t matched by the languages typically used for infrastructure automation. Moreover, there’s less of a learning curve because developers can pick a syntax they’re already familiar with.

Pulumi provides its platform as an open-source project. It recently passed 1 million monthly downloads following a tenfold increase in adoption over the last year, the startup says. Pulumi generates revenue through a paid cloud-based version of the platform, plus a product called CrossGuard that helps ensure infrastructure adheres to security and compliance rules.

Users include Snowflake Inc., Salesforce.com Inc.’s Tableau unit and Lemonade Inc., among others. 

The $37.5 million round Pulumi announced this morning was led by NEA. Madrona Venture Group, which led the startup’s previous funding round, participated as well along with Tola Capital. The startup has taken in a total of $57.5 million since launching three years ago. 

Pulumi plans to step up product development with a focus on creating libraries for automating infrastructure management and simplifying the user experience. Go-to-market activities will also be scaled up.

The idea of harnessing standard programming languages for infrastructure management is gaining traction elsewhere in the industry as well. Amazon Web Services Inc. in May launched cdk8s, an open-source tool that enables developers to manage Kubernetes clusters with the TypeScript, Python, Java and .NET languages. 

Image: Pulumi