Weaveworks Inc., a venture-backed developer of Kubernetes management software, is closing its doors.

Weaveworks co-founder and Chief Executive Alexis Richardson announced that the startup is shutting down in a LinkedIn post published today. According to Richardson, the company had generated more than $10 million in revenue before the decision was made to shutter it. Moreover, Weaveworks ended 2023 with about twice as many new customer signups as a year earlier.

Richardson detailed that the company had to shut down because this “sales growth was lumpy and our cash position, consequently volatile.” He added that a “very promising M&A process with a larger company fell through at the 11th hour.”

London-based Weaveworks launched in 2014 and went on to raise $60 million from investors. The company closed its most recent funding round, a $36 million Series C raise, in 2020. The company reportedly received a $100 million valuation following the investment.

Weaveworks’ flagship product was a software platform called Weave GitOps Enterprise. It’s designed to ease the task of managing Kubernetes clusters and the applications they power.

Kubernetes has numerous settings, customization options and extensions that can be difficult to configure. Deploying the container management framework manually takes upwards of weeks in some cases. Weaveworks’ Weave GitOps Enterprise platform includes configuration templates that remove the need to set up Kubernetes manually, which speeds up deployment.

Once a Kubernetes cluster is running in production, it becomes susceptible to so-called drift. This is a type of technical issue that emerges when important configuration settings are modified in a way that reduces a container environment’s performance or security. Weave GitOps Enterprise promises to help developers detect and fix drift.

The platform also simplifies several other tasks, most notably the process of installing new applications on Kubernetes. It allows developers to deploy new code on a small subset of the containers in a cluster to limit the impact of potential malfunctions. If an error emerges, the affected containers can be quickly rolled back to an earlier version.

Several of Weave GitOps Enterprise’s core features are based on an open-source project called Flux. Weaveworks, the project’s developer, donated it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2019. Richardson detailed today that “I am working with several large organizations to make sure CNCF Flux is in the healthiest state.”

Flux enables developers to define the configuration of a Kubernetes cluster using code. That removes the need to configure cluster settings manually, which saves time and effort. Flux also includes features that help mitigate the risk of outages when software teams deploy new applications in a Kubernetes environment.

Image: Weaveworks