The Aryavarth Express
Aryavarth (Bengaluru): Loft Labs, the innovator behind vCluster and DevPod, has secured $24 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Khosla Ventures and included contributions from Fusion Fund, Surface Ventures, Emergent Ventures, and Berkeley SkyDeck Fund. Kit Merker, a Kubernetes pioneer at Google, also participated as an angel investor. This funding boosts Loft’s total investment to $28.6 million.
Founded in 2021 as Semi-Stow and now rebranded as Outpost, Loft Labs has quickly become a pivotal player in platform engineering. The company has made significant strides over the past year, achieving a 4.6x increase in ARR and over 40 million image pulls for its vCluster technology. Additionally, Loft launched vCluster Pro and the open-source project DevPod, which codifies reusable development environments.
Loft Labs integrates with tools like Rancher, HashiCorp Vault, and Argo CD, and serves customers including CoreWeave and Outreach. Its innovative solutions have attracted attention from several Global Fortune 500 companies.
“We are building critical infrastructure for the digital age, akin to what roads and bridges serve in the physical world,” said Lukas Gentele, co-founder and CEO of Loft Labs. “With the support of Khosla Ventures, known for backing industry leaders like OpenAI and GitLab, we’re poised to redefine platform engineering.”
This new funding will enable Loft to double down on its mission to streamline Kubernetes operations. Its products simplify the deployment and management of complex AI infrastructures, reduce multi-cloud management headaches, and provide cost-effective alternatives to traditional infrastructure setups.
Khosla Ventures’ partner, Jon Chu, remarked on the investment, “Loft is setting a new standard in virtualization, offering solutions that promise significant operational flexibility and efficiency gains for enterprises looking to escape vendor lock-in and harness the full potential of multi-cloud environments.”
Loft Labs is also expanding its leadership team, bringing on Denise Schannon as VP of Engineering. Schannon’s expertise from her time at SUSE and Rancher Labs will be crucial as Loft continues to scale.