Kubecost is a FinOps business that assists teams like Allianz, Audi, Rakuten, and GitLab in monitoring and optimizing their Kubernetes clusters with an emphasis on cost and efficiency. IBM announced on Tuesday that it has purchased Kubecost.
The news on Tuesday comes after IBM acquired Apptio, a different FinOps business, for $4.3 billion in 2023. Additionally, in prior years, IBM purchased businesses such as application performance monitoring startup Instana and cloud app and network management company Turbonomic. With the acquisition of KubeCost, IBM is now able to further strengthen its IT and FinOps capabilities in response to businesses’ growing need for better management of their increasingly complicated on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
“Since launching in 2019, our mission has been to optimize the world’s infrastructure,” co-founder and CEO of Kubecost Webb Brown stated on the business blog. “We started with Kubernetes cost monitoring, and we’ve proudly become the most widely adopted solution in the cloud native ecosystem. Now, as a result of this merger, we’re poised to accelerate our mission by delivering broader, end-to-end cost management solutions to teams everywhere.”
It’s important to remember that OpenCost, the foundation of Kubecost’s commercial solution, is an open source project that is vendor-neutral and created by Kubecost. OpenCost is one of the sandbox projects of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, having debuted in 2022.
Although Apptio purchased Cloudability in 2019 and Turbonomic, IBM claims that Kubecost will be integrated into its FinOps Suite. However, it wouldn’t be shocking if IBM also further integrated Kubecost/OpenCost into its OpenShift enterprise platform.
The purchase price was kept a secret by the two businesses. In 2022, Kubecost completed a $25 million Series A fundraising round headed by Coatue Management. In 2021, First financing Capital led a $5.5 million seed financing for the startup.