Dagger has announced the launch of a new DevOps platform into public beta. The platform aims to automate management for software supply chains with the intention of tackling some of the problems experienced with the DevOps process, particularly in CI/CD and automation pipelines. The open source project was founded by Docker founders Solomon Hykes, Sam Alba and Andrea Luzzardi. The platform can be run on any runtime compatible with Docker allowing applications to run unchanged on multiple platforms.

The startup also announced that it has raised $20 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Nat Friendman, Brian Stevens, Idit Levin, Julie Volz, Ellen Pao, and Daniel Lopez. The startup had also raised $3 million in pre-seed funding and $7 million in a seed round led by New Wave bringing the total raised so far to $30 million.

The new funding will go towards growing the team and focusing on the features of the platform.

According to Dagger, one of the biggest problems DevOps teams face is having a standardized set of building blocks. The adoption of cloud is also creating further complexity with supply chains growing so big they create bottlenecks. While a variety of DevOps tools are currently available, Dagger believes that they tend to be very specialized, resulting in developers having to piece them all together into artisanal pipelines which can be complicated and time consuming.

Dagger aims to simplify the process of configuration, providing a large catalog of pre-built actions. It is also possible to make reusable custom actions for the software development lifecycle. It means that developers no longer have to rewrite the same script over and over, and enables migration from one system to another without the need for rewriting.

By Emily Nicholls