IBM announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Kubecost, a FinOps startup that helps companies monitor and optimize their Kubernetes clusters. Kubecost counts Allianz, Audi, Rakuten, and GitLab among its clients and focuses on efficiency and cost savings. The acquisition is part of IBM’s ongoing effort to bolster its IT and FinOps capabilities, as enterprises increasingly seek better ways to manage their complex cloud and on-premise infrastructures.
This follows IBM’s 2023 acquisition of Apptio, another company in the FinOps space. Kubecost was founded in 2019 with a mission of optimizing global infrastructure. Co-founder and CEO Webb Brown expressed enthusiasm about the acquisition on the company’s blog, stating, “We started with Kubernetes cost monitoring, and we’ve proudly become the most widely adopted solution in the cloud-native ecosystem.
ibm’s strategic acquisition of kubecost
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 notable that Kubecost is also behind OpenCost, a vendor-neutral open source project that forms the core of Kubecost’s commercial offering. OpenCost, launched in 2022, is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
IBM plans to integrate Kubecost into its cloud offerings, which already include Cloudability (acquired by Apptio in 2019) and Turbonomic. There’s speculation that Kubecost and OpenCost could be integrated deeper into IBM’s OpenShift enterprise platform as well. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Kubecost last raised a $25 million Series A round led by Coatue Management in 2022, with an initial $5.5 million seed round led by First Round Capital.
