A trio of cloud industry leaders has launched a new company, ConfigHub, with a mission to modernize software configuration data management. Emerging from stealth today with $4 million in funding, ConfigHub is the brainchild of CEO Alexis Richardson, founder of cloud-native container management platform Weaveworks; CTO Brian Grant, former Google software engineer and original lead architect of Kubernetes; and CPO Jesper Joergensen, who led various product roles at Salesforce (including Heroku) before joining Twilio to lead its voice, video, and platform teams.

The company's emergence is timely, given the recent high-profile configuration-related disasters, such as CrowdStrike's awry configuration update to its Falcon Sensor security software, which caused widespread havoc and over $5 billion in losses for Fortune 500 companies. This incident demonstrated that software is now critical infrastructure, held together with a web of interdependent components connected by APIs to create powerful systems and applications. However, if any part of that web becomes compromised, deliberately or otherwise, it can bring down not just the whole house, but the entire town.

ConfigHub is setting out to address the configuration data sprawl that has become a major challenge in modern software development and deployment. According to Richardson, "The problem is that configuration data is scattered all over the place — it's become a total sprawl." The company promises to "unify configuration management with modern, automated development workflows and compliance." Instead of having to go hunting for the right piece of configuration that corresponds to a given error, on ConfigHub, everything will be held in a single database, making configs easy to find, replete with a live view that shows what the system is actually doing.

Joergensen, who learned a valuable lesson at Heroku (a Salesforce-owned platform-as-a-service), emphasized that code and configuration data are not the same and require very different approaches. Configuration data defines system settings and behaviors that can't be debugged in the same way as software code can. But understanding this data — whether with tools like TerraForm or Kubernetes — is vital for avoiding costly misconfigurations that can cause outages or delays.

The product, which will be served via a SaaS model, will focus initially on Kubernetes DevOps tooling such as Helm, Argo, Flux, Terraform, and its open-source fork Opentofu. Richardson says that ConfigHub is already working with some "medium to large" enterprise design partners, though he did not reveal names. The product is still some months from formal launch, so today's announcement is more about ConfigHub introducing itself to the world and announcing its $4 million investment.

The funding comes from some notable VC and angel investors, including Crane Venture Partners, Encoded Ventures, Pear VC, Poolside CEO Jason Warner, and Google's VP of infrastructure, Eric Brewer. Warner noted that AI will compound the configuration challenge, and companies need mature solutions to hard problems. ConfigHub is a missing piece to allow this rewrite to take place safely.

While ConfigHub is not the first company to address configuration issues, its founders' expertise and the modern stack of dynamic, cloud-native, AI-powered, containerized applications set it apart from incumbent players like ServiceNow and Atlassian. Richardson emphasized that those kinds of tools are not well-suited to the modern stack, and companies can't have somebody trying to roll out AI if a simple misconfiguration means that the AI will see their company data and publish it on the internet.

Prior to ConfigHub, Richardson founded an enterprise-focused cloud messaging company called RabbitMQ, which was acquired by VMWare subsidiary SpringSource in 2010. Then in 2014, he founded Weaveworks, which went on to raise more than $60 million in funding from a who's who of investors including Accel, Amazon Web Services, and Google Ventures. At Weaveworks, Richardson also developed the GitOps framework, which is now widely used in cloud-native and Kubernetes environments for managing infrastructure and application deployment.

Grant and Richardson met through their work at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which counted Kubernetes as its inaugural project after Google donated it in 2015. Around 2020, Grant started giving up his various leadership roles around the Kubernetes project, and over time, he developed an idea for a new business whose focus likely wouldn't align with Google's priorities. This would eventually align, though, with Weaveworks coming to an untimely end last year.

With ConfigHub, the trio is poised to make a significant impact on the cloud computing landscape, bringing their collective expertise to bear on one of the most pressing challenges facing modern software development and deployment.