CRV + Release - aligned from the beginning - now with $20M in new fuel

Today we’re announcing a $20M Series A funding round led by CRV with participation from Sequoia, Y Combinator, Bow Capital, Artisanal Ventures, SOMA, Amit Agarwal (CPO of DataDog), Chase Gilbert (Built) and Bill Clerico (WePay). This is on the heels of the Seed Round we announced back in April of 2021 that closed in April of 2020.

While a funding round is just a step along the way, I wanted to take a quick minute and talk about why we, along with our investors, are so excited about what is being built at Release. I’ll do that by talking through the engagement we had with CRV and why we chose them as our Series A partners.

Back in October of last year, like many entrepreneurs, I received a cold email from CRV saying they were interested in what we’re building and wanted to chat. I decided to ignore the email initially (like any good focused founder would do) but a line in the email stuck out in my head:

“I've recently been exploring the developer tools space, and Release stood out to me. I think your approach to helping developers create on-demand staging environments is compelling, and would eliminate a lot of unnecessary complexity for developers.”

It really was the last part of that sentence that kept ringing in my head: “eliminate a lot of unnecessary complexity for developers.” This is precisely the reason Erik, David and I started Release after our time at TrueCar. Building software in 2021 is still incredibly complex for developers. Devs today spend far too much time working on non-value added work. If environments worked for developers instead of against them, more ideas would make their way to the world. From the first interaction with CRV, we were aligned on the problem we’ve set out to solve with Environments as a Service here at Release.

I decided to reply a couple weeks later and let CRV know we had just raised a Seed round earlier in the year, but we should chat in early 2021. They reached back out and the rest is history.

From the very first conversations with Brittany Walker, James Green and Murat Bicer, it was obvious CRV had a thesis on our space and had really been doing their research. The questions were insightful and as we got to know each other, it was clear we had an aligned vision for what the future of developing on the cloud will look like. Environments are a manifestation of an application running in a complex cloud ecosystem, and if those environments are easy to reproduce then developers can move faster with higher quality output. Back to the original statement in the email they sent to me, “I think your approach to helping developers create on-demand staging environments is compelling, and would eliminate a lot of unnecessary complexity for developers.” Full alignment from the beginning.

We’ve been growing like mad here at Release and this round of funding led by CRV will enable us to continue delivering Environments as a Service to companies who value velocity, quality and ensuring developers spend their time on value-added work. Too much time is wasted by organizations messing around with unnecessary complexity.

If you’re an organization that’s tired of wasting time and you want to deliver quickly for your customers, hit us up at hello@release.com and we can show you how Environments as a Service can enable your organization to deliver like never before.

Last, I wanted to say how proud I am to work with this team and what we’ve accomplished together so far. Thank you all for your hard work and dedication. More to come from this amazing team (and maybe you?).

We’re building some amazing technology at Release and helping our customers achieve their missions. We’re heads down making AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, Pulumi, RDS, and tons of other great technologies work seamlessly and effortlessly into the developer experience. We build Release with Release, so day to day we see how our solutions can make the lives of developers better. If you’re interested in being a part of the journey let us know! We have a ton of open roles.