Seattle startup Pulumi is making an enormous guess because it seems to carry the AI coding revolution to cloud infrastructure.
The corporate on Tuesday debuted Neo, a brand new AI agent that automates cloud infrastructure duties at enterprise scale.
Pulumi CEO Joe Duffy mentioned he pulled a 3rd of his 130-person workforce to construct Neo, which he described as “an extension of your workforce,” able to dealing with infrastructure provisioning, safety, and compliance work that may historically take days or even weeks.
Neo builds on Pulumi’s infrastructure-as-code (IaC) basis and makes use of massive language fashions — primarily Claude — mixed with enterprise guardrails. It integrates with AI developer instruments comparable to Devin, Cursor, Windsurf, and VS Code by way of Pulumi’s Mannequin Context Protocol server, and lets customers modify its autonomy from human-approved steps to totally automated workflows.
AI has remodeled utility improvement, letting builders spin up apps and web sites in seconds. Pulumi is betting the identical sample will emerge for advanced back-end cloud infrastructure — and it’s launching Neo at a time when platform groups are struggling to maintain up as builders write extra code than ever.
“Whereas developer groups race to undertake AI, platform groups are drowning in managing the infrastructure calls for, and a quantity/velocity disaster develops,” mentioned Sheila Gulati, managing director at Tola Capital, a Pulumi investor. “Infrastructure provisioning remains to be guide due to compliance priorities internally. This creates a compounding bottleneck.”
Automating platform engineering duties will assist corporations proceed making AI investments and keep away from being throttled by infrastructure capability, safety, and resilience wants, Gulati mentioned.
Duffy mentioned buyer reception has been “mind-blowing.”
“Neo goes to assist them sustain and spend extra time on strategic duties, relatively than firefighting on a regular basis,” he mentioned.
Early prospects are utilizing Neo to remediate hundreds of compliance violations or improve dozens of Kubernetes clusters with zero downtime. Pulumi says beta customers have delivered 10 occasions extra infrastructure, deployed 75% sooner, and lower coverage violations by 90%.
The corporate constructed Neo in partnership with AWS, utilizing the cloud big’s new Bedrock Agent Core service.
Duffy mentioned he expects main competitors if Neo features traction, however he believes Pulumi’s IaC basis offers it a moat.
Based in 2017, Pulumi now counts greater than 3,700 prospects together with Nvidia and BMW, with a couple of million downloads per week of its IaC device. The corporate has raised $99 million thus far, together with a $41 million spherical in 2023, and is producing income within the tens of tens of millions.
The startup lately moved into a brand new workplace at Two Union Sq. in downtown Seattle and opened a subsidiary in Europe because it expands globally.
