CUE Labs exits stealth after $10 million capital increase

Configuration errors have caused some of the world’s most costly outages: grounding flights worldwide, halting operations at banks and hospitals, wiping out billions in market value, and exposing the personal data of millions of individuals. Misconfigurations are one of the leading causes of outages and system vulnerabilities. This challenge continues to grow as rapidly advances in deploying complex AI systems. The intricate web of models, data pipelines, and autonomous agents introduces an entirely new scale of risk, making verifiable and robust configuration more critical than ever.

Ex-Googler, Marcel van Lohuizen and his co-founder Paul Jolly founded CUE Labs, offering a Configuration Control Plane based on CUE, an open-source configuration language, which is used by a growing number of users and contributors including organizations such as Microsoft, Fastly, Alibaba, Elastic, Mercari, and Docomo, across sectors including e-commerce, cloud, telecommunications, IoT, and energy.

Prior to founding CUE Labs, Marcel van Lohuizen spent over 18 years at Google and co-created Borg, Google’s pioneering cluster management system that inspired Kubernetes. He led the development of Borg’s orchestration tooling and the GCL configuration language. Both Borg and GCL are still core to Google’s infrastructure today. “In the twenty years of dealing with large scale configurations, we have learned about anti-patterns, common mistakes, what prevents configurations from scaling, and what causes outages”, said Marcel. “CUE is the culmination of those learnings and helps users to avoid these pitfalls.”

The Configuration Control Panel allows organizations to manage, audit, and validate all data, from build-time configurations to runtime payloads, and know the full impact of any configuration change. Its first component, the Central Registry, is already publicly available and delivers a library of verified schemas for secure module sharing and reuse across teams and environments.

With over $10M in early funding secured, CUE Labs is now out of stealth mode. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital and OSS Capital as lead investors, as well as Founders Fund, Dell Technologies Capital, and leading angel investors.

(Press release/RAN)
Image: CUE