CUE Labs Secures Over $10 Million in Early Funding to Combat Configuration Chaos

Zug, Switzerland – CUE Labs, the company behind the widely adopted CUE open-source configuration language, has officially emerged from stealth, announcing its formal launch and over $10 million in early funding. The investment round was led by Sequoia Capital and OSS Capital, with participation from Founders Fund, Dell Technologies Capital, and several angel investors. This significant capital injection is aimed at accelerating CUE's open-source development and establishing a Configuration Control Plane to address the pervasive issue of misconfigurations in complex software systems.

The announcement, made today, highlights CUE Labs' mission to provide stewardship and resources for the CUE project, ensuring its long-term viability and evolution. "Big news: We’re thrilled to officially announce CUE Labs, the company behind CUE, founded by creator @mpvl_ and @_myitcv," stated the company in a social media post. "CUE Labs provides the stewardship and resources accelerating CUE's open source development and ensuring its long-term future."

CUE Labs was co-founded by Marcel van Lohuizen, the original creator of CUE, and Paul Jolly. Van Lohuizen, who spent over 18 years at Google, co-created Borg—Google's pioneering cluster management system that inspired Kubernetes—and led the development of its orchestration tooling and the GCL configuration language. His extensive experience in managing large-scale configurations underpins CUE's design philosophy.

The company aims to tackle the multi-billion dollar configuration challenge, as misconfigurations are a leading cause of costly outages, security vulnerabilities, and compliance issues across industries. Bill Coughran, a partner at Sequoia Capital, emphasized the criticality of CUE, stating, "Configuration is one of the least understood and often costly problems in modern software systems, and in a world that heavily relies on AI-agents, CUE can provide the necessary guardrails to keep systems stable." CUE Labs' new Configuration Control Plane is designed to transform enterprise configuration from a liability into a strategic asset.

CUE, a declarative configuration language, has already garnered a robust user base, including organizations like Microsoft, Fastly, Alibaba, Elastic, Mercari, and Docomo, spanning sectors such as e-commerce, cloud, telecommunications, IoT, and energy. The platform helps organizations understand, audit, and validate all data, from build-time configurations to runtime payloads, preventing outages and ensuring compliance. The newly launched Central Registry, the first component of the Configuration Control Plane, provides a library of verified schemas for secure module sharing and reuse.