Opera, a startup building an orchestration platform for DevOps teams, announced today that it had raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by Felicis Ventures. New investor HMG Ventures and existing investors Clear Ventures, Trinity Partners, and Firebolt Ventures also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $19.3 million.
Founded in January 2020, Opera lets developers provision their CI/CD tools through a single framework. Using this framework, they can build and manage their pipelines for various use cases, including their software delivery lifecycle, infrastructure as code, and SaaS application releases. With this, Opera aims to help teams set up and operate their various DevOps tools.
The company’s co-founders, Chandra Ranganathan, and Kumar Chivukula, met at Symantec a few years ago. Ranganathan then spent the last three years at Uber, running that company’s global infrastructure. Meanwhile, Chivukula ran Symantec’s hybrid cloud services.
“As part of the transformation [at Symantec], we delivered over 50+ acquisitions. That had led to using many cloud platforms, many data centers,” Ranganathan explained. “Ultimately, we had to consolidate them into a single enterprise cloud. That journey led us to the pain points of what led to Opera. There were many engineering teams. They all had various tools and stacks needed for their use cases.”
The challenge then was to give developers still the flexibility to choose the right tools for their use cases while also providing a mechanism for automation, visibility, and governance — and that’s ultimately the problem Opsera now aims to solve.
“In the DevOps landscape, […] there is a plethora of tools, and many people are writing the glue code,” Opera co-founder Chivukula noted. “But then they’re not. They don’t have visibility. At Opera, our mission is to bring order to the chaos. And we want to do this by giving choice and flexibility to the users and providing no-code automation using a unified framework.”
Wesley Chan, a managing director for Felicis Ventures who will join the Opera board, also noted that one of the following significant areas for growth in DevOps is how orchestration and release management are handled.
“We spoke to a lot of startups who are all using black-box tools because they’ve built their engineering organization and their DevOps from scratch,” Chan said. “That’s fine if you’re starting from scratch and you just hired a bunch of people outside of Google, and they’re all very sophisticated. But then, when you talk to some of the larger companies. […] You have all these different teams and tools — and it gets unwieldy and complex.”
Unlike some other tools, Chan argues, Opera allows its users the flexibility to interface with this wide variety of existing internal systems and tools for managing the software lifecycle and releases. “This is why we got so interested in investing because we just heard from all the folks that this is the right tool. There’s no way we’re throwing out our internal stuff.
This would wreak havoc on our engineering team,” Chan explained. He believes that building with this broad existing ecosystem in mind — and integrating with it without forcing users onto an entirely new platform — and its ability to reduce friction for these teams will ultimately make Opera successful. Opera plans to use the new funding to grow its engineering team and accelerate its go-to-market efforts.
