Last fall, we announced Armory’s $28M Series B investment (and the year before that, our $10M Series A). Today, I’m pleased to share that we have raised a $40M Series C investment led by B Capital with Marc Benioff and Lead Edge Capital joining the round, and participation by our existing investors. This brings our total funds raised to $82M. We are welcoming Rashmi Gopinath from B Capital to our Board of Directors, as well as Margaret Francis, our Chief Operating Officer. The full press release is here, with coverage from BusinessInsider, TechCrunch and Crunchbase.
In late 2016, we started Armory from my garage in Belmont, CA with a vision to unlock innovation by making software delivery continuous, scalable and safe.
We had a secret that we’d gleaned from over 100 in-depth interviews we’d conducted over the span of three months. Over and over, we kept hearing leaders at Global 2000 companies talk about how difficult software delivery was to do safely, with velocity, at scale.
We compiled over 400 pages of notes, probing to understand how engineering leaders were grappling with the creative destruction forces that are shrinking corporate longevity on the S&P 500 from 33 years to just twelve.
Over and over, we heard these leaders tell us how the brittle software delivery infrastructure they had built in-house to deploy software into their legacy data centers was useless for deploying their software into cloud targets like AWS, GCP and Azure. The teams that built this brittle in-house tooling had left long ago, and nobody understood exactly how it worked. Executives had very little to zero visibility into their own companies’ software delivery lifecycles. This, combined with increasing pressure to “innovate faster” meant engineering leaders had to choose between delivering software safely vs. doing so with velocity, a Faustian bargain they had to make with each release.
And back in 2016, we knew the real challenges were still on the horizon. Kubernetes was brand new, and companies were just starting to contemplate breaking monolithic apps into microservices. Infrastructure was evolving from one static data center target, which it had been for decades, to many fragmented targets across multiple clouds, which enterprises had never had to manage before.
Worse still, the deployment itself was just one of the dozens or hundreds of often-manual steps a company had to undertake to get software delivered safely into production. Coordinating multiple teams across dev, sec, and ops — not to mention product teams and executives — was being done in ad-hoc ways full of friction (like over email!), with many gates being thrown up to ensure safety at the expense of velocity. Many of those steps were being tracked in spreadsheets, and often, only in people’s heads. And when key people went on vacation, or left, a company was blocked from deploying at all. As Kelsey Hightower has stated, companies need to “serialize culture” through code in order to scale effectively.
We could see that each of these challenges would compound the others. We knew that if Global 2000 enterprises were serious about thriving in a digital age, they would need to replace their brittle in-house tooling built to deploy one monolith to one data center target with a modern, next-generation cloud-native platform that could deploy hundreds (or thousands) of microservices across multiple, fast-evolving cloud targets while codifying the software delivery processes from code to cloud.
We decided to build that platform.
What we didn’t know at the time was that COVID-19 would massively accelerate the severity of these pain points and drive an urgent need for enterprises to become more digital, and less analog, faster.
Armory is building the modern, cloud-native software delivery platform of the future, providing both safety and velocity, to enable our enterprise customers to innovate faster in a digital-first age.
Armory’s ultimate vision is to unlock innovation by making software delivery continuous, scalable and safe. We are strong partners to some of the world’s largest and most progressive companies like JPMorgan Chase and Autodesk.
I just re-watched our YCombinator Demo Day pitch from early 2017, which we recently made public, and it’s incredible to see how consistent our strategy has been from the very beginning as Armory has scaled. In that video, I shared how Armory would build auditing and compliance features for modern, progressive enterprises that want to achieve both safety and velocity in their software delivery — and not have to choose between the two. Today Armory builds on Spinnaker with the Open Policy Agent to offer a Policy Engine and Pipelines as Code that enable Policy-Driven Deployments to meet this need, helping companies serialize their software delivery culture. We’ve also built a Kubernetes deployment agent for teams deploying at ultra-scale to thousands of targets. With the support of B Capital and our other incredible investors, we are also making our platform more accessible by building a SaaS version, which we’re offering early access to.
Armory: Building on Spinnaker
Armory also recently helped open-source a plug-in framework for Spinnaker, the multi-cloud-native continuous software delivery project created by Netflix and Google which powers the core of Armory’s platform. This has made it easier for other dev tools across the SDLC to integrate into Spinnaker, making them more useful and valuable. There is a Splunk CD Observability plugin, and extensions for Pulumi, Gremlin, Styra, Dynatrace, Sumo Logic, and others. Our objective is to unlock the siloed data living in an enterprise’s software delivery tooling and enable it to work better together via a unified SDLC data model.
We are also helping ensure Spinnaker becomes the open standard cloud-native software delivery project, with support from AWS, Google and Microsoft.
Over 1,000 companies are in production with Spinnaker, and Spinnaker has over 3,000 contributors, including companies like Adobe, Spotify, SAP, Nike, IBM and Salesforce. If you’d like to learn more about Spinnaker’s community, you can watch our keynote from the 2019 Spinnaker Summit which featured talks by Airbnb, Pinterest, Snap, Discovery, Salesforce and others.
The 2020 virtual Spinnaker Summit starts on October 19th, and we encourage you to join our community on Slack.
Other Resources:
- If you’d like to move from your brittle legacy software delivery tooling built in-house to a modern platform with cloud vendor support and industry best-practices codified out-of-the-box, just contact us. We are here to help you unlock innovation through software.
- If you’d like to come build the future with us, we’re hiring across all departments, and my personal goal as CEO is to build the most diverse and inclusive company in Silicon Valley. We are remote-first (some of our crew works from sailboats and Airstreams) and we are building a company with a very intentional culture.
