Top Dev Entrepreneurs Invest $2M in Earthly, Build Tooling for the Post-Container Era

Founders of popular development platforms such as Mesosphere, Cockroach Labs, Digital Ocean, DataDog and Envoy Proxy join in forces to reinvent everyday build tooling.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Earthly Technologies, a new company reinventing software build tooling for the post-container era, has closed its seed round of funding from top-tier investors and high-profile entrepreneurs. 468 Capital led the round, joined by Uncorrelated Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Hack VC and a number of founders of high-profile developer platforms, including DataDog, Digital Ocean, Cockroach Labs, Instana, Sentry.io and Envoy Proxy.

Earthly brings consistency between development and continuous integration (CI) in the same way that containers have brought consistency between development and production. Earthly saves time for developers by guaranteeing that the tests they execute on their laptop will behave the same throughout the rest of the pipeline. Earthly fits into existing workflows, acting as a glue layer on top of traditional CI technologies.

“Developers are the most valuable resource a company has, and yet they spend significant time tracking down transient build problems and battling inefficient CI processes that waste precious time,” says Vlad A. Ionescu, founder and CEO of Earthly Technologies. “Throughout the last decade, cloud development and continuous delivery have changed the industry. Generic build tooling has not kept up with modern best practices, and that is hurting productivity. Earthly is here to solve these issues.”

“Vlad is a repeat entrepreneur with an extensive background in cloud computing from Google and VMware. He has built well-known cloud technologies in the past, including RabbitMQ, Lever OS and ShiftLeft. I can’t think of anyone better suited to spearhead this effort,” says Jeremy Levine, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners.

“To build the next-gen build tool, the team asked itself, ‘what if the burden of making a build consistent was lifted from the user?’” says Florian Leibert, founder of D2iQ (formerly Mesosphere) and managing partner of 468 Capital. “Containers have brought us consistency between development and production, but it’s now time for consistency between development and CI - this is what Earthly is for.”

Earthly builds are easier to understand than traditional build tools. “Traditional build processes are too often complicated and can only be maintained by an in-house build guru,” says Spencer Kimball, founder of Cockroach Labs and creator of GIMP. “Earthly, on the other hand, uses a syntax familiar to every cloud developer, as it is based on the same language that is used to define Docker containers. In fact, the combination of containers and a familiar syntax means that Earthly easily fits into existing workflows.”

"For years containers have been used to build systems that are self-contained and replicable, but ironically the build and CI/CD systems themselves were not self-contained and replicable," said Salil Deshpande, General Partner of the new Bain-backed firm Uncorrelated Ventures, which focuses on infrastructure software. "Earthly has solved that problem, finally."

Earthly is a free, open-source platform and has skyrocketed to over 800 stars on GitHub since its launch in April. Earthly Technologies is working on upcoming cloud-based features like shared caching and highly parallel execution in a cluster. You can try Earthly out at https://earthly.dev. Follow Earthly on Twitter (@EarthlyTech) to stay up-to-date on new developments.

About Earthly

Earthly is a build automation tool for the post-container era. It allows you to execute all your builds in containers. This makes them self-contained, reproducible, portable and parallel. You can use Earthly to create Docker images and regular artifacts (binaries, packages, arbitrary files). For more information see https://earthly.dev or the Earthly project on GitHub https://github.com/earthly/earthly.