Infrastructure-as-code startup Pulumi Corp. said today it has closed on a $41 million round of funding.

Today’s Series C round was led by Madrona and saw participation from NEA, Tola Capital and Strike Capital. It’s the first time Pulumi has sought outside funding since raising $37.5 million back in October 2020. All told, Pulumi has now raised $99 million from investors since launching in 2017.

The startup has emerged as a key player in the IaC market, selling tools to help companies automate the management of their cloud computing environments. More specifically, Pulumi’s tools make it easier for teams to use code to provision and manage cloud infrastructure, instead of adjusting hundreds of settings manually.

Pulumi’s IaC approach has a lot of merit because the process of involving an application on cloud infrastructure is both complicated and tedious. Teams must provision and configure each infrastructure resource that the application will use. They also need to define security rules and set up the individual components of each app. All of these tasks can be simplified by using code.

The core technology that allows teams to do this is Pulumi’s Packages, which are used to define cloud infrastructure resource provisioning. Pulumi Packages can be thought of as cloud reference architectures provided in the form of software development kits, code samples and how-to guides.

Developers can reuse or modify their Pulumi Package code as required. So, for example, an infrastructure team can build a component for deploying Kubernetes on Amazon Web Services that automatically configures the availability zones, security groups, access roles and auto-scaling, while specifying the required resources. Developers can then reuse that component for additional deployments later or tweak it as required.

Madrona Managing Director Soma Somasegar said Pulumi has become critical to numerous global enterprises as the leading open-source IaC provider. “With the size and complexity of cloud infrastructure rapidly increasing as enterprises continue their digital transformation journey, the scale, power and ease of use that Pulumi provides is more valuable than ever,” he said.

Pulumi backed up those claims, saying that it has managed to double its revenue in the last year, off an undisclosed base. It said it now counts more than 2,000 customers and over 150,000 total users of its platform. In the last year, enterprises including Univision Communications Inc., Moderna Inc., the LEGO Group, Pinecone Systems Inc. and many others have deployed Pulumi for the first time. The company says more than half of the Fortune 50 use Pulumi’s software as the basis of their IaC efforts.

Strike Capital General Partner John Lagomarsino said he was “awestruck” by the customer appreciation of Pulumi’s platform. He explained that the company has “created incredible fans and a loyal following among cloud engineers and developers.”

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said enterprises are building more software than ever before, and task such as operating, distributing and maintaining that software have increasingly become a burden. Pulumi attempts to solve this, using software to operate software. “This is a powerful paradigm that has gotten lots of attention,” Mueller said. “With the new funding, Pulumi can continue to build out its software architecture to enable the end goal of automated software operations.”

Earlier this year, Pulumi became one of the first IaC providers to jump on the generative artificial intelligence bandwagon that was kickstarted by ChatGPT when it launched Pulumi Insights. One of its key features is PulumiGPT, which can be used by developers and engineers to use natural language to request that it writes new infrastructure code for any architecture, any cloud and in any programming language.

Alongside today’s funding round, Pulumi said it has hired Bob Laskey, who previously led revenue teams at Microsoft Corp. and Cloudflare Inc., as its new chief customer officer. In his new role, he’ll be tasked with improving customer experiences and building out Pulumi’s partner ecosystem.

Pulumi co-founder and Chief Executive Joe Duffy said the funds from today’s round will be used to make Pulumi’s IaC software more easily accessible. It also plans to accelerate innovation in its open-source platform and enhance its security and generative AI capabilities. “This funding will accelerate our growth and enable us to solve even more of our customers’ toughest cloud challenges,” Duffy added.

Image: Pulumi