Two founders of the Kubernetes project at Google, Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, today announced their new company, Heptio. The company has raised $8.5 million in a series A investment round led by Accel, with participation from Madrona Venture Group.

Open source Kubernetes is a widely deployed technology for container orchestration. Now, Heptio will bring a commercial version of the software to enterprises.

The founders say their product will help companies accelerate software development, increase infrastructure efficiency, and reduce the complexity of managing software at scale.

“Heptio’s early focus is on making Kubernetes more accessible to developers running apps on-premises or in the public cloud,” said Heptio CEO McLuckie, in a prepared statement. “While the technology is incredibly powerful, we have seen developers struggle to get up and running quickly. We plan to work closely with the open ecosystem to advance the platform, and deliver the features enterprises need to run Kubernetes at scale.”

The open source Kubernetes project was started in 2014 by McLuckie and Beda, along with a small number of Seattle engineers. Today it is the most active project on Github with over 1,000 contributors, according to the Heptio execs.

Beyond Google, Kubernetes has been adopted by large technology companies like Red Hat, IBM, VMWare, and Canonical to manage clusters of containers on their customers’ infrastructure.

The project is now housed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), part of the Linux Foundation. The CNCF was founded in July.

Before creating Kubernetes, McLuckie and Beda worked together to create and deliver Google Compute Engine. Beda, who will serve as Heptio’s chief technology officer, subsequently left Google to join Accel as an entrepreneur-in-residence to explore various company ideas. McLuckie recently left Google, where he was also responsible for initiating and chairing the CNCF.

Photo: Joe Beda (left) and Craig McLuckie (right).