The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Financial decision · 2012–2013
AnsibleWorks raises $6M to make enterprise IT automation simple
AnsibleWorks raised $6 million from Menlo Ventures to commercialize Ansible, its agentless open-source automation framework with 300,000 users.
AnsibleWorks
What the business is
AnsibleWorks commercializes Ansible, an open-source IT orchestration engine that coordinates configuration management, application deployment and IT workflow through one simple, agentless interface instead of custom scripts or software installed on managed devices.
How it started
Michael DeHaan created Ansible in 2012 after years at Red Hat and Puppet Labs, where he had built earlier automation tools and watched complexity grow when software was not designed around how people work. AnsibleWorks grew around the project, with DeHaan as co-founder and CTO and Saïd Ziouani as co-founder and CEO, aiming the engine at teams that found Puppet and Chef heavy.
What happened
By August 2013 Ansible counted 300,000 users and downloads approaching 30,000 per month, with AppDynamics, Evernote and MapR among adopters alongside Fortune 500 companies. In July 2013 the company launched AWX, its first commercial enterprise product, adding a graphical interface and REST endpoint on top of the open-source engine; a month later AnsibleWorks raised $6 million from Menlo Ventures to pursue the enterprise market against Puppet, Chef and emerging Salt.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
AnsibleWorks commercializes Ansible, an open-source IT orchestration engine that coordinates configuration management, application deployment and IT workflow through one interface. Its bet was that IT automation could be radically simplified — no agents, nothing installed on managed devices, workflows most people can read — and that open-source popularity would pull users into a paid enterprise product.
Michael DeHaan created Ansible in 2012 after working at Red Hat and Puppet Labs and building the Cobbler and Func automation tools, where he saw first-hand how complex automation gets when it is not designed around the way people work. AnsibleWorks grew around the project with DeHaan as co-founder and CTO and Saïd Ziouani as co-founder and CEO, and by August 2013 the engine had 300,000 users and downloads approaching 30,000 per month, including AppDynamics, Evernote and MapR and Fortune 500 customers.
In July 2013 AnsibleWorks launched AWX, its first commercial enterprise product, adding a graphical interface and REST endpoint on top of the open-source engine. A month later it raised $6 million from Menlo Ventures, positioning against DevOps leaders Puppet and Chef and rising Salt — with the argument that Ansible offered the best of Puppet and Chef while staying simple enough to make app delivery faster.
What has to be true
- DeHaan built Ansible from firsthand frustration at Red Hat and Puppet Labs: automation became complex when not designed around how people work.
- Agentless operation and a readable language lowered the skill barrier, letting less technical staff automate — a different wedge from Puppet's and Chef's master-and-agent models.
- 300,000 users and ~30,000 downloads a month proved demand for the open-source core before AWX, the first paid product, had launched.
- Menlo Ventures' $6 million funded turning that grassroots popularity into an enterprise business just as AWX gave IT managers a graphical interface and REST endpoint.
What can be applied
Simplicity can beat incumbents from below: no agents, no installs, readable playbooks made Ansible the easy alternative to Puppet and Chef — open-source pull came before the paid product.
Aftermath
As of 2013-08-13 AnsibleWorks had announced a $6 million investment from Menlo Ventures, a month after launching AWX, its first commercial enterprise product. Ansible itself counted 300,000 users and downloads approaching 30,000 per month. The TechCrunch article records no later milestones, so the case stops at the raise announcement.
Sources
- AnsibleWorks Raises $6M For Popular Open-Source And Easy-To-Use IT Automation Framework
- AnsibleWorks Raises $6M
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