Top 9 Cloud Native Startups to Watch in 2021

9 DevOps Startups To Watch in 2021

DevOps is a rapidly growing billion-dollar industry with hundreds of startups bringing up innovations to automate and improve the process every year.

The DevOps software market is projected to generate over $15 billion in revenue by 2021, posing a great market opportunity for new and existing CI/CD startups to thrive in 2021 and beyond.

In this article, we’ll look into some of these companies that have been performing and expected to make remarkable progress with their innovation, valuation, exceptional growth, and implementation of new DevOps trends in 2021.

CircleCI

Over the last few years, CircleCI has gained a popular spot among developers and tech investors as the company has continually improved on its popular CI/CD toolkit delivered through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product.

Founded in 2011, the San-Francisco-based company raised a total of $215 Million in funding with the last round (Series E) summing about $100 million in April 2020.

With these staggering funding amounts, the company is able to direct funds at innovative marketing strategy and introducing new features in its CI/CD platform, like the previous update with a UI indicating which tests failed in pipeline pages.

According to Enlyft, CircleCI has been used by over 3,000 companies mostly based in the US and accounts for up to 17.69% of the Continuous Delivery (CI) total market share.

With improved products and marketing, the company can push its products to more companies and developers, thereby expected to make waves in 2021.

Harness

Founded in 2016 by Indian-American, Jyoti Bansal, Harness is one of the industry’s first Continuous Delivery as a Service platform that provides a simple and secure way for DevOps teams to continuously release applications into production.

Harness attained unicorn status with a $1.7 billion valuation in January 2021 after raising $115 million in its series C fundraising round this year.

The San-Francisco-based company recently integrated a continuous efficiency feature in its continuous Delivery-as-a-Service platform.

This feature provides DevOps teams with clear visibility into the cost of each application and microservice thereby allowing them to create a more cost-effective product while being aware of its cloud costs.

With the great start Harness has recorded this year, it is expected to direct funds to further improving its existing products and innovating into new DevOps trends in 2021.

GitLab

Definitely one of the unquestioned leaders in the DevOps space, GitLab is a unicorn startup, raising a total of $434.2 million in all fundraising rounds.

Founded as a web-based open-source git repository manager in 2013, the Sid Sijbrandij founded startup has over the years grown into an industry-leading full-lifecycle DevOps platform.

GitLab is widely used by small and large enterprises as part of their CI/CD pipelines and security process to provide a simple and hitch-free development-deployment process.

With a team of 52 members, the company has an impressive 10.66% share of the source code management market.

GitLab is known to be an innovative startup that is always updating, improving, and introducing new features to its CI/CD platform and is expected to make a more significant impact in the DevOps industry in 2021.

Netlify

Netlify has gained a lot of glory among developers and companies deploying applications in recent times.

Netlify’s CI/CD support connects directly to your GitHub repository, once a new code is committed, it automatically runs and deploys it into your application.

Raising $53 million in its last series C funding in March 2020, the San-Francisco company has raised a total of $97.1 million in all five funding rounds with 17 core team members.

Netlify’s CI/CD and deployment is a hitch-free process allowing enterprises to focus more on creating a more interactive user experience.

With over 15,000 companies using Netlify, it accounts for about 2.69% of the software development tools market share.

LaunchDarkly

LaunchDarkly is an emerging unicorn startup that provides a feature management platform that allows software developers to build and deploy code at any time, even if the feature isn’t ready to be released to all users.

LaunchDarkly platform provides a unified interface where developers, product, marketing, and sales teams can collaborate and manage code in real-time.

Founded in 2014, LaunchDarkly raised a total of $130.3 million in funding, $54 million in its last series C1 funding round.

LaunchDarkly, with 11 engineers and 598 customers, accounts for roughly 3.52% of the Continuous Delivery market share.

Bitrise

Bitrise is a series A DevOps company that provides a platform for automated integration, testing, and deployment for mobile app developers. It provides a Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) Platform as a Service (PaaS).

The fast-rising Hungary-based company, founded in 2014 raised about $20 million in its series B fundraising round with startup investors like Fielder Capital taking the lead.

Bitrise has shown consistent growth in its products over the few years and promises improvements and innovations in 2021.

Volterra

Founded in 2017, Volterra is a Santa Clara-based startup helping DevOps teams overcome the operational, security, and performance challenges of running apps across distributed cloud and edge environments.

Volterra has two products, VoltStack which uses Kubernetes APIs to deploy and manage distributed applications across cloud platforms, and VoltMesh which adds high-performance networking and zero-trust security.

The startup raised a total of $50 million in its first round of funding with more than 50 engineers and over 30 customers in November 2019.

The startup was one of the most impactful in the DevOps space last year and is projected to do more in 2021.

Sysdig

Sysdig’s security compliance platform has been experiencing an increasing demand since the company’s inception.

Netting over $191.5 million in total funding amount, the organization completed its Series E funding phase in January 2020 with $70 million which was diverted funding and improving its CI tools with significant growth recorded in 2020.

The Sysdig Secure DevOps platforms enable organizations to monitor performance and capacity needs across Kubernetes-orchestrated container environments.

The startup is constantly improving and scaling operations for availability in more countries to accommodate its increasing growth globally.

ShuttleOps

Founded in 2019, ShuttleOps introduced an innovative visual DevOps platform that speeds up the application delivery process.

Its application release orchestration technology provided through a Software as a Service model helps developers, IT and security operators collaborate effectively to the continuous integration and delivery pipelines.

ShuttleOps latest no-code CI/CD solution integrates with top DevOps tools like Docker, Kubernetes, and Chef to remove complexity and rapidly build, deploy and manage applications on the most prominent cloud platforms.