The hard part of running a fleet of computers is getting them to agree. Progress Chef turns configuration and compliance into code - and makes a business of checking whether the machines obey.
An insurer needed weeks to build an environment of 30 servers. Puppet helped cut that to under a day. The more interesting trick is keeping those servers from becoming strangers.
Armory made a business of helping companies ship software without holding their breath. Its journey from a Belmont garage to a Harness asset deal reveals why safe deployments need more than a faster button.
Spacelift’s cleverest product is not infrastructure automation. It is permission: a way for more people to change the cloud without turning every deployment into a trust fall.
Scalr once made cloud provisioning so easy that customers asked it to stop. That failure led to a sharper idea: the useful platform is not the one that opens every door, but the one that lets developers move quickly without losing the keys.
Pulumi replaced configuration dialects with TypeScript, Python, Go and friends. The more revealing victory came later, when a customer discovered that the expensive part was not the tool - it was rebuilding everything around it.

Cloudsmith is a Belfast-founded, cloud-native artifact management platform that gives engineering teams a single place to store, secure, and distribute software packages and containers across 30+ formats. It acts as a private, fully managed registry with built-in supply chain controls - vulnerability and malware scanning, policy enforcement, quarantine, and global distribution - increasingly positioned around governing the flood of code produced by AI coding agents.
env0 (pronounced "env zero") is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) management and cloud governance platform that lets engineering teams run Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Kubernetes and Helm with self-service workflows, policy-as-code guardrails, cost visibility and drift detection. Founded in Israel in 2018, the company gives developers a fast, GitOps-driven way to provision cloud environments while platform and finance teams keep control over cost, security and compliance.
PlainID is an Israeli cybersecurity company and the recognized pioneer of Policy-Based Access Control (PBAC). Its authorization platform lets enterprises define, manage, and enforce who can access what across applications, data, APIs, microservices, and - increasingly - AI agents, replacing the tangle of hard-coded access rules scattered across systems with centralized, dynamic, real-time policy decisions. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Tel Aviv with a strong New York presence, PlainID has raised roughly $99-100M and serves Fortune 500 organizations across financial services, healthcare, telecom, and government.
Resourcely was a San Francisco cybersecurity startup that made cloud infrastructure secure and compliant by design. Its platform paired Blueprints - self-service templates that generate golden-path Terraform and OpenTofu - with Guardrails, a policy engine written in a human-friendly language called Really that catches misconfigurations before deployment. Founded in 2022 by Travis McPeak and Aladdin Almubayed and backed by $8M in seed funding, Resourcely was acquired by Anysphere (maker of the AI code editor Cursor) in July 2025, with McPeak joining to lead Cursor's security efforts.
XOPS (legal name XperiencOps, Inc.) is a Menlo Park-based autonomous IT company that emerged from stealth in August 2025 with $40M co-led by Activant Capital and FPV Ventures. Billed as the first 'Active System of Intelligence,' its platform builds a living knowledge graph of an enterprise's fragmented IT estate and deploys a legion of goal-oriented software robots that coordinate existing systems - ServiceNow, Workday, Okta, Intune - to drive desired states across employee, device, and software lifecycles. The pitch: declare the outcome you want, and XOPS continuously converges your systems toward it, no tickets, no human middleware.
Opal Security is an AI-native identity and access governance platform that gives enterprises real-time visibility and direct control over every identity - employees, service accounts, and AI agents alike. Founded in 2020 in San Francisco, Opal replaces stale, checkbox-style access reviews with policy-as-code and just-in-time access so organizations can enforce least privilege at scale instead of merely auditing it after the fact.