ConfigHub secures $4M to address the configuration crisis of application operations

LONDON and SAN FRANCISCO – ConfigHub Inc launches today and announces that they have secured $4M pre-seed financing led by Crane Venture Partners, Pear VC and Encoded Ventures. The company is founded by industry leaders Brian Grant, Alexis Richardson and Jesper Joergensen, and angel investors include Jason Warner, James Bayer, Stu Bailey, Pete Foley, Aparna Sinha, Nitay Joffe, Grant Miller and Kit Merker. Funding will be used to support initial customer deployments of the new product.

ConfigHub is modernising technology operations by rethinking how software configuration data is structured, authored, edited, and managed.   

In the last twenty years, the industry has watched two trends unfold. Software becoming infrastructure, with stories like a bad update from one company disabling software by another company causing the grounding of major airlines. And the way software is built and run is becoming completely fragmented, as any single application is now an amalgamation of parts and pieces—each of which is an island of operation of its own.

What used to be the fairly minor role of “config” has now expanded into the entire architecture of software as a sprawl of mismatched and mutually unintelligible data with the power to do serious harm.  Config is described by The New Stack as a “labyrinth of settings and dependencies”, so that when something inevitably goes wrong, customers experience downtime and delays. In TNS’s words this is a “configuration crisis.”  

The ConfigHub team formed around a shared belief that this crisis exists because tools and workflows have not kept up with the dramatic evolution in software deployment. Twenty years ago we upgraded systems using CD-ROMs with service packs. Today, every company is a software company that relies on a myriad of interdependent software modules deployed to a complex web of API-controlled infrastructure. These companies are missing a comprehensive way to describe, inspect, and evolve the configuration data that powers it all.

At Google, Brian Grant led the design of the Kubernetes declarative architecture that is the foundation of modern infrastructure used by the vast majority of enterprises, while Jesper Joergensen brought his experience at Heroku to leading Twilio’s Voice, Video and Platform teams. They are joined by Alexis Richardson, best known for RabbitMQ and GitOps, which is the standard delivery automation model for cloud-native applications.

“We founded ConfigHub because, over and over and over again, we see even sophisticated organisations like GitHub attributing major outages to config errors,” said Alexis Richardson, CEO. “When GitHub is on fire then we know that managing config is an ubiquitous problem. The time has come to modernise operations.”

“The significant contributor to these problems is that SREs and operators need to make changes through complicated and cumbersome Infrastructure as Code formats, tools, and processes,” added Brian Grant, CTO. “It’s so complex and error prone that a fix often causes an even bigger outage. We have to change the paradigm or software delivery will just grind to a complete halt as the complexity increases.”

“At Heroku I learned that code and configuration are two different things that need different approaches. We have made great progress on evolving collaborative coding practices with tools like Github. But the configuration of live infrastructure needs a different approach. It is not just a bunch of files. Our goal is to bring the elegant app dev experience, pioneered by Heroku, to every kind of live production operations,” said Jesper Joergensen, CPO.

Industry surveys show that customers want better DORA metrics as well as more consistent security. ConfigHub is working with initial design partners who want to eliminate the configuration errors and manual toil that contribute to this. The team will announce a product beta soon, with an initial focus on the Kubernetes devops tool-chain - including Helm, Argo, Flux, Terraform and Opentofu.  Customers are welcome to get in touch directly by email (hello@confighub.com) or sign up to our mailing list through the form posted on our website.

The investment team for ConfigHub is Aneel Lakhani from Crane Venture Partners, Arash Afrakhteh from Pear VC, and Alex Benik from Encoded.  

"In the past year alone, we've seen multiple high-profile configuration failures at some of the world's most sophisticated technology companies and Fortune 500 enterprises. It's remarkable that even organizations with virtually unlimited resources still struggle with these fundamental operational challenges, proving it's not a talent problem, but a process and tools problem," said Aneel Lakhani, investor at Crane, "which is why we couldn't be more excited to invest in a team that will bring configuration management into the modern era."

"In today’s cloud-native landscape, configuration is both the backbone and the bottleneck of modern software operations. The ConfigHub team brings unparalleled expertise and a bold vision to tackle the complexity that has plagued even the most advanced organizations. Their approach to unifying configuration management with modern workflows is exactly what the industry needs to move beyond reactive firefighting and into proactive, scalable operations. We are thrilled to support ConfigHub as they bring clarity and control to this critical challenge," said Arash Afrakhteh, Partner at Pear VC.

Jason Warner, CEO and co-founder of Poolside, joining as an angel, adds: "AI completely upends how the entire world writes, makes, and operates software entirely, not just code writing. The next few years are much more than just vibing about small changes to greenfield code bases. Enterprises need mature solutions to hard problems. ConfigHub is a missing piece to allow this rewrite to take place safely."

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About ConfigHub

ConfigHub unifies the fragmented world of operating applications across disparate infrastructures by treating configuration like data and giving teams the ability to operate in production with confidence.  

ConfigHub is a new SaaS product for application teams operating in conditions of live production. Whatever your starting point, ConfigHub will help you to consolidate, understand and build on configuration to make application management easier, better and safer.  Make changes to what your customers see and get immediate results.  Run and fix your apps without filing tickets and having meetings about spreadsheets, pipelines and infrastructure as code.

We are a distributed team with staff, customers and investors in the USA, EMEA and Asia.

Please check our website for product news and other updates.