Garden Exits Stealth with €3.1 Million in Funding to Transform the Future of Cloud Native Development

New Garden Enterprise automation platform unifies development, testing and CI for Kubernetes applications, bringing production-like environments to every step of the process

Garden, creators of an open source-based development automation platform for Kubernetes and cloud native applications, announced €3.1M in funding and new technology that reimagines the future of cloud native developer workflows. The seed funding was led by Crowberry Capital with participation from byFounders.  Pre-seed funding was led by Fly Ventures, and included System.One, Tiny.vc, as well as angels Renaud Visage (founder, Eventbrite), Chad Fowler (former GM Developer Advocacy, Microsoft), Olivier Pomel (CEO, Datadog) and David Helgason (founder, Unity). Garden will use the funds to build out its engineering, sales and marketing teams, and to support its growing user and customer base.

Available today, Garden Enterprise is the first solution to unify development, testing and CI for cloud native applications with a single platform that works across all stages. Garden provides developers with production-like environments for every step of the cycle, enabling in-cluster development, efficient integration and end-to-end testing, reliable code review, QA and more. Available as an open source product since 2018 and with a vibrant user community, Garden Core provides highly efficient workflows for Fortune 500 companies and other organizations with complex software systems.

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Garden was founded by a team of engineers who recognized an urgent need for a development automation platform for the cloud native era. The widespread adoption of containers and Kubernetes, expected to account for $8.2B in spend by 2025, has made it easier than ever to operate and scale applications. However, these new technologies have added lots of complexity to the day-to-day development process, and important workflows such as environment management and testing have been largely overlooked. As a result, many developers find that they’re less productive now than they were before the adoption of cloud native technologies.

“Developers today are wasting as much as 25 percent of their time waiting on CI pipelines and repeatedly solving the same boilerplate problems when building cloud native applications,” said Jon Edvald, CEO and co-founder of Garden Technologies. “We founded Garden to deliver better solutions to Kubernetes developers with a fresh approach that unifies dev, testing and CI workflows. Garden Enterprise operates as a hybrid dev and automation platform, eliminating the need for customers to maintain multiple tools and configurations for the same application, and  enabling them to be much more efficient and productive.”

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Today, organizations need to invest heavily in internal tooling in order to stay productive when working on cloud native applications, especially as projects and teams grow in size. Garden greatly reduces the amount of custom tooling and education required for teams, while retaining a high degree of flexibility and customizability, resulting in a predictable and efficient pre-production pipeline for even the most complex of applications.

“We use Garden to provide more than 50 engineers with an isolated development environment in a shared Kubernetes cluster. Our team can develop their microservices remotely and more quickly test changes and iterate on their services in a production-like environment,” said Mitchell Friedman, engineer at OakNorth Bank. “Garden also powers our continuous integration pipeline, where we run all of our image builds, unit and integration tests. Sharing cached results for images and tests reduces cycle time for developing features and getting our work merged and ready to release.”

Garden Enterprise, built on top of the open source Garden Core, enables DevOps engineers to quickly and securely roll out Garden to development teams. Garden Enterprise allows organizations to:

• Reduce operating cost and resource waste by automatically halting unused environments and resources. Today, 44% of cloud compute is used for non-production environments, which are used 40 hours a week yet accrue 168 hours per week in costs.

• Simplify developer onboarding by centrally provisioning and managing keys for different environments and individual users. As organizations around the globe go remote, secure and efficient employee onboarding becomes a critical capability.

• Automatically start and tear down preview environments for pull requests, to enable both technical and non-technical stakeholders to see and interact with a production-like replica of the application before pushing to production.

• Gain a central view of all environments, log all activity in one place and visualize the performance of your builds and tests. This high-level view makes it easy to identify bottlenecks in the testing and development pipeline and to optimize them.

“Across our portfolio, we’ve observed the challenges around developer productivity, and they only seem to be growing,” said Jenny Ruth, founding partner at Crowberry Capital. “The Garden team, some of whom we’ve worked with previously, are exceptionally talented engineers, and we’re excited to support them in solving this massive problem for enterprises around the globe.”

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