The company that decided your laptop is the wrong place to run Kubernetes - and moved the whole environment to the cloud.
Above: the Okteto mark. A small logo for a tool whose entire job is to disappear - the best developer software is the kind you stop noticing.
Here is a mundane fact of modern software that costs a great deal of money: developers spend an enormous amount of time waiting for their code to run.
The waiting is not glamorous, which is precisely why it went unfixed for so long. If you build applications on Kubernetes - the container-orchestration system that runs much of the cloud - the loop between "I changed a line of code" and "I can see whether it worked" historically ran somewhere between five and ten minutes. You build a container image, you push it, you deploy it, you wait. Do that a few dozen times a day, across a few dozen engineers, and you have quietly funded a small vacation home in lost time.
Okteto's pitch is that this is a solvable problem, and that solving it is worth a company. Its core product moves your development environment off your laptop and into the cloud, in a Kubernetes cluster that looks like production. You still write code locally, in whatever editor you like. But when you hit save, Okteto synchronizes the change into the running cloud environment in under three seconds. The ten-minute loop becomes a three-second loop. Nobody notices the tool; they only notice that the waiting stopped.
This sounds like a narrow feature, and in a sense it is. But narrow features that remove a universal daily friction have a way of becoming platforms. Once your environment lives in the cloud, other things get easier. Okteto will spin one up with a single command. It will spin up a fresh, shareable environment automatically for every pull request, so a reviewer clicks a link instead of pulling a branch and hoping it runs. It describes environments as code, in a manifest, so a new hire's first day involves one command instead of a week of "why won't this build."
And then, because someone has to pay the cloud bill, Okteto quietly does the unglamorous accounting: it watches which environments are idle, scales them down to zero, and garbage-collects the ones nobody is using. This is the feature that finance departments love more than developers do, and in enterprise software that is often the feature that closes the deal.
Figures drawn from public reporting and company statements; revenue is a reported approximation from late 2024.
Companies like to describe their founding as inevitable. Okteto's is more honest: three friends who had scattered into comfortable corporate jobs decided they missed building together. Ramiro Berrelleza was at Atlassian, by way of Microsoft Azure and a startup called ElasticBox. Pablo Chico de Guzman was at Docker. Ramon Lamana was at Google. They reconnected, moved to Madrid for a summer, and hacked on a prototype.
A mentor looked at what they had and told them to apply to Y Combinator. They did, and got in - the Winter 2019 batch. The product started life as an open-source command-line tool, which is a sensible way to build developer software: you give away the useful thing, developers adopt it because it solves their problem, and only later do you build the enterprise features that companies will pay for. Okteto still maintains that open-source CLI. It is the front door.
The three founders map cleanly onto the three jobs a developer-tools company needs done. Berrelleza is chief executive. Chico de Guzman, the Docker alumnus, is chief technology officer. Lamana is chief product officer. It is a tidy division of labor, and it has held.
The money followed the usual arc, with an unusually good guest list. A seed round from Haystack, Root Ventures, and Uncorrelated Ventures. Then, in February 2022, a $15 million Series A led by Two Sigma Ventures. The angels on that round are worth reading as a signal: the founders of LaunchDarkly, Replicated, FingerprintJS, Bitnami, and Mesosphere all put money in. Those are people who have built developer and infrastructure companies themselves. When they write checks into a developer-tools startup, they are effectively saying they recognize the problem - and think this team can charge for the fix.
Okteto is really a small suite of products stacked on one idea: the environment belongs in the cloud, not on your machine.
Deploy and develop in the cloud with one CLI command. Write code locally, watch it run live in a production-like Kubernetes environment.
Every pull request gets its own unique, shareable version of the app - built for code review, end-to-end tests, and stakeholder feedback.
Environment-as-code. Standardize and automate every dev environment on Kubernetes so setup is one command, not one week.
Scales idle apps to zero and garbage-collects unused resources - the cost-control layer that keeps cloud bills sane.
Run the whole platform inside your own AWS, GCP, or Azure account. Available via the AWS Marketplace.
Give every AI coding agent its own ephemeral, governed, production-like environment - and run hundreds at once.
Every infrastructure company in 2025 had to answer the AI question, and most answered it badly, by bolting a chatbot onto an existing product. Okteto's answer is more interesting because it falls out of what the company already does. AI coding agents can write code. The harder, quieter question is: where does that code run? An agent that generates a change but cannot build it, deploy it, and test it against real services is producing suggestions, not software.
So Okteto pointed its environment engine at the agents. Its Agent Fleets product, launched in early beta in 2025, gives every agent its own fully provisioned environment - services, configs, dependencies, the works - that spins up in seconds, runs the task, and shuts down when done. The pitch to platform teams is that they can run hundreds of concurrent agent runs with governance bolted in: access controls, resource limits, monitoring, and a bill that does not explode, because Okteto connects each ephemeral environment to shared instances of everything else rather than duplicating the entire stack per agent.
Okteto has been willing to argue the point publicly, drawing a line between a "sandbox" - a throwaway box to run untrusted code - and an "environment" - something production-like, connected to real data and services, that an enterprise agent actually needs to be useful. Whether that distinction becomes the industry's vocabulary is unknown. But it is a coherent bet, and it reuses the exact infrastructure the company spent years building for humans.
There is a neat symmetry here. The original insight was that a developer should not wait ten minutes to see if their code works. The new insight is that neither should an agent - and that an agent, unlike a developer, will happily ask for a fresh environment ten thousand times a day.
Series A led by Two Sigma Ventures, Feb 2022. Seed from Haystack, Root Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures. Bar widths are proportional to round size.
Production-ready Kubernetes dev environments, free for small teams.
Self-service, $19 per user per month.
Custom pricing, plus self-hosted Bring Your Own Cloud.
Berrelleza, Chico de Guzman, and Lamana leave Atlassian, Docker, and Google and prototype in Madrid.
Joins YC's Winter 2019 batch and releases its open-source CLI for Kubernetes development.
Raises seed capital from Haystack, Root Ventures, and Uncorrelated Ventures.
Two Sigma Ventures leads a $15M round to accelerate cloud-native developer experience.
Reaches roughly $5M in revenue with a ~21-person team and ships testing inside Kubernetes environments.
Extends its environment engine to run and test AI coding agents at scale.
Okteto is a fully distributed company of roughly eighteen people, with no central office and a benefits page that reads like a manifesto for not burning people out: unlimited paid time off with a three-week minimum, paid parental leave, and a company-sponsored offsite so a remote team occasionally shares a room. It is SOC2 Type 2 compliant, which matters because its customers hand it the keys to their development infrastructure.
The customer list is the kind that developer-tools companies want: monday.com, LaunchDarkly, and Replicated - organizations that live and die by developer velocity and have the scale to feel the ten-minute build loop as real money. Reaching roughly $5 million in revenue with about twenty people is not a headline-grabbing number, but it is a healthy ratio, and in a market that has cooled on growth-at-all-costs, capital efficiency is its own kind of achievement.
The competitive field is crowded - Gitpod, Coder, Northflank, Qovery, Loft Labs, and Garden all circle the same problem from different angles. Okteto's wager is that owning the full arc, from a developer's local save to a governed fleet of AI agents, on the customer's own cloud, is a more defensible position than any single feature. The AI pivot is a test of that thesis. If agents become heavy consumers of ephemeral environments, the company that already knows how to provision and bill them cheaply is well placed. If they do not, Okteto still has a real business fixing a real, boring, expensive problem for humans.
It moves Kubernetes development, preview, and testing environments into the cloud, so developers can code locally, run in a production-like cloud environment, and see changes live in seconds.
It was founded in 2018 by Ramiro Berrelleza (CEO), Pablo Chico de Guzman (CTO), and Ramon Lamana (CPO), and joined Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch.
Over $18 million, including a $15 million Series A in February 2022 led by Two Sigma Ventures.
There is a free tier for small teams, a self-service Developer Pro plan at $19 per user per month, and custom-priced Team and Enterprise plans.
Launched in 2025, Agent Fleets let platform teams run and test AI coding agents at scale, giving each agent its own ephemeral, production-like, governed environment.
Watch: product demos and talks are on the Okteto YouTube channel. Founder Ramiro Berrelleza speaks regularly at cloud-native and engineering-leadership events.