The DevOps talent gap has become one of the biggest choke points in software development. Hiring and keeping skilled engineers is tough, and the shortage is slowing product launches across the industry. Qovery, a Paris-born SaaS platform that promises to cut through that bottleneck by automating application deployment, just raised $13 million to scale its solution—and its presence in the United States.
The Series A round was led by IRIS, with Speedinvest, Crane Venture Partners, Techstars, and Irregular Expressions returning from earlier rounds. Angel investors include some heavyweight operators: Datadog cofounders Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, Docker cofounder Sebastian Pahl, and Checkout.com CTO Ott Kaukver, who is also taking a seat on Qovery’s board.
Founded in 2020, Qovery positions itself as a way for software teams to ship faster without having to build large in-house DevOps departments. Cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure offer endless services, but stitching them together and running deployments across multiple environments can eat up months of engineering time. Kubernetes helps automate some of that work, but it’s still a major headache for developers. Qovery’s bet is that teams don’t want to spend their best talent fighting with infrastructure.
DevOps Automation Startup Qovery Doubles Down on U.S. Market After $13M Raise
The platform installs in minutes and takes on the heavy lifting of application deployment and infrastructure management across clouds and on-premise Kubernetes clusters. By doing so, Qovery claims customers cut setup times from months to a single day and triple their DevOps efficiency. That translates into hundreds—or even thousands—of releases per day without losing visibility or cost control.
Growth numbers suggest the pitch is landing. Qovery says it’s growing 115% year-over-year, with half its business already coming from U.S. customers such as Talkspace and RxVantage. The new capital will help the startup accelerate its push in the U.S., expand its team, and invest in product development, including AI-driven features.
CEO and cofounder Romaric Philogène framed the challenge directly: “Software companies face a difficult trade-off: either build an expensive and slow-to-scale in-house DevOps team, or depend on external consultants at the cost of autonomy and flexibility. Qovery solves this by enabling organisations to ship products faster, at lower cost, while letting developers spend more time coding and less time managing the cloud infrastructure.”
For investors, the attraction is clear. “As software and cloud growth continues to accelerate, the need for simple solutions to manage increasingly complex deployment infrastructures has become prevalent, and is further heightened by a DevOps talent shortage,” said Anaïs Monlong, Venture Principal at IRIS.
That shortage is what drew Datadog’s Alexis Lê-Quôc as well. “Having built Datadog, I know how challenging it can be to scale software without DevOps becoming a bottleneck. Qovery’s approach resonated with me immediately because it addresses a pain point I’ve personally experienced. I believe it will change how engineering teams everywhere deploy software.”