Kubernetes tooling startup Garden Germany GmbH, which does business as Garden.io, said today it has raised $16 million in a new round of funding aimed at helping it fulfill its mission of improving developer productivity.

Today’s Series A round was co-led by 468 Capital and Sorenson Ventures and included participation from existing backers Crowberry Capital, Fly Ventures and others.

Garden.io has developed what it calls a “graph-based framework” for developers that enables them to deliver Kubernetes software to the cloud faster than they can do otherwise. It does this by automating builds, deployments and tests for each stage of the software delivery cycle. It means developers have more time to work on the issues that will have a bigger impact on their businesses.

For now, Garden.io said, it’s primarily focused on Kubernetes containers, which are used to host the components of modern applications. However, its platform also caters to cloud infrastructure via Terraform and Pulumi integrations.

Its platform provides a “batteries-included” framework for DevOps automation, with realistic remote development environments on demand. That means developers can rapidly iterate while coding, running tests efficiently from any location, the company said.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Garden.io founder and Chief Executive Jon Edvald (pictured) said the company’s platform is most useful for developers in the first half of the software delivery cycle. It helps developers to reduce the time and effort they spend on building and maintaining custom, in-house tooling, setting up and debugging development and testing environments, and waiting for and debugging continuous integration and deployment or CI/CD pipelines.

“Garden.io can consistently build whole systems and spin up production-like environments from scratch, allowing developers to quickly see results as they work, to preview changes for their team, and run automated tests, all in one setup,” Edvald said. “It is unique in that it works the same way from developers’ laptops and in CI/CD automation, and accelerates both. This is powered by the stack graph, which can describe how an entire system is built, deployed and tested, from source to finish.”

Edvald claimed that the average developer will be able to save several hours of time every single week using Garden. As a result, he said, development teams are able to ship new software faster, with less frustration in their day-to-day operations.

Garden.io reckons there is an urgent need for developers to save time. The company cited data from a 2021 survey it did with Vanson Bourne, which shows how cloud developers only spend 11% of their time on actually writing code. That’s because the average developer has to spend around 14 to 16 hours on maintaining internal tooling, setting up development environments, debugging pipelines and waiting for builds and test results.

“It’s really jarring to see that the average cloud developer spends four to five hours a week working on code and more than three times that on perfunctory tasks, wrangling tools, code about code and simply waiting,” Edvald said. “I believe it’s feasible to reclaim as much as a full productive day, each week, per developer, and that is our mission.”

To fulfill that mission, Garden.io said it intends to use the funds from today’s round to broaden the support of its developer tooling to cover serverless platforms and integrations with popular DevSecOps and software supply chain management platforms. The company is also planning to triple its staff by the end of the year.

“With this latest fundraise, we can build out our platform to further improve developer productivity and make the power of modern cloud systems more accessible to the average developer,” Edvald said.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said there’s a big demand among enterprises for better DevOps support. “The space keeps attracting VC investments and there is room for both technical and geographical differentiation,” he said. “That is the case for Garden.io, whose platform is built on a unique, graph-based inner working.”

Image: Garden.io