IBM announced on Tuesday the acquisition of Kubecost, a FinOps startup focused on helping companies optimize their Kubernetes clusters for efficiency and cost. Kubecost’s clientele includes notable names like Allianz, Audi, Rakuten, and GitLab. This move is part of IBM’s ongoing strategy to enhance its IT and FinOps capabilities as enterprises face increasingly complex cloud and on-premises infrastructure management.
Kubecost co-founder and CEO Webb Brown expressed enthusiasm about the merger in a company blog post. 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,” Brown wrote.
Kubecost is also behind OpenCost, an open-source project launched in 2022 and part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s cohort. IBM plans to integrate Kubecost into its existing FinOps tools, which include Cloudability (acquired by Apptio in 2019) and Turbonomic. There is speculation that IBM may further embed Kubecost/OpenCost within its OpenShift enterprise platform.
IBM enhances FinOps with Kubecost
The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. Kubecost’s last funding round was a $25 million Series A round led by Coatue Management in 2022, following an initial $5.5 million funding led by First Round Capital.
This acquisition follows IBM’s $4.3 billion acquisition of Apptio in 2023, another company in the FinOps space. The move signals IBM’s sustained efforts to enhance its capabilities in financial operations and cloud management. As usage of Kubernetes rapidly grows, with 84% of organizations using or evaluating the technology today, cost visibility, management, and resource optimization for these shared resources have become pressing concerns for cloud practitioners.
IBM’s FinOps suite combines IBM Cloudability’s FinOps capabilities and IBM Turbonomic’s AI-automated cloud performance optimization integrations in one solution. This gives teams the ability to inform, optimize, and operate cloud investments regardless of where their workloads are hosted. The acquisition of Kubecost is another example of IBM strengthening its automation portfolio through a mix of organic innovation and strategic integrations.
These moves aim to help organizations reduce complexity and increase control of their IT environments.
