GitOps pioneer Weaveworks unravels after funding fabric frays

Company burned through $61.6M in investment

Former cloud native darling Weaveworks has announced that it is closing its doors after failing to get acquired and suffering from a "volatile" cash position.

CEO Alexis Richardson made the announcement on LinkedIn, where he boasted of "double digit (>$10 million) revenue" but bemoaned "lumpy" sales growth. A merger and acquisition deal fell through at the last minute, so one of the earliest pioneers of Kubernetes and cloud native services found itself with little alternative but to shut down.

Weaveworks began life in 2014, a year before version 1.0 of Kubernetes emerged. According to Crunchbase, it started with a $5 million investment, then added $20 million in a round led by Google Ventures in 2016, and most recently took $36.6 million in 2020. However, that $61.6 million was insufficient to keep the lights on.

The company will leave behind Flux, a Kubernetes GitOps operator, which it originally built for its own deployment pipeline and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). In 2019, Flux was accepted as a Sandbox project. It graduated in 2022, and the most recent version, 2.2, became generally available in December 2023.

Richardson said: "I am working with several large organizations to make sure CNCF Flux is in the healthiest state."

The end of Weaveworks highlights the challenges companies face in the tech world, particularly those that have grown on the back of investment and gone on to deal with tough competition. Many companies have recently turned to AI branding to attract further investment.

"I could say that this should not have happened," said Richardson, "but I know that we are not alone in this market. Bigger vessels have gone astray."

While eulogizing the company, Richardson noted milestones including the start of the CNCF and GitOps. However, he also told his employees: "There have been dire moments too, but we figured most of them out together."

While some self-inflicted, system-wiping catastrophes could be dealt with, it appears that running out of cash was one disaster too far.

And the future, particularly for those who paid the company for its services? "Customers and partners will be working with a financial trustee whom we shall announce soon." ®