Pulumi launched a premium tier of its software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform targeted at helping development teams bridge the gap between programming languages and cloud native infrastructure. It also snared $15 million in a Series A funding round.

The Team Edition tier is designed for collaborative environments within an organization. It builds on Pulumi’s previously launched Community Edition by adding access for “unlimited” users compared with just one for the Community Edition; support for a handful of continuous delivery platforms like GitHub, Slack, and Webhooks; adds role-based access control (RBAC) for security; and provides onboarding support.

More importantly for Pulumi’s bottom line, the Team Edition is priced per stack.

Pulumi CEO Joe Duffy explained that the Team Edition answers requests it has been receiving from enterprises looking to expand the platform deeper into their development cycle. He added that the company has seen positive support from its launch of the premium tier.

“An open source company is hard to trust until you announce what your business model is,” Duffy said. “The community wants to know what the pay boundary is.”

The company will continue to offer its original open source-based Community Edition for free.

“That original plan is not going away and we remain fully committed to supporting it and the open source community,” Duffy said. He added that the company is also working on a more robust enterprise version with broader security features.

Pulumi launched its commercial product in June, with the task of bridging developer code with the growing number of cloud-based destinations, including containers, serverless, and infrastructure. The company’s platform is designed to allow developers and DevOps teams to build and manage cloud-based deployments using a consistent approach.

Duffy explained that the company's secret sauce is its ability to act as a translation layer between the language a developer is using to write code and where that code is being sent.

The platform is multi-language, multi-cloud, and fully extensible. Languages supported include JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, and Go. Cloud platform support includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

It also includes Kubernetes integration that works with any public, private, or hybrid cloud deployment. Pulumi last month added a Kubernetes software-development kit (SDK) to further ease that integration process.

The new funding round was led by Madrona Venture Group and also included Tola Capital. Both of those firms were part of Pulumi’s initial $5 million seed round.

Duffy said the company will hire developer advocates, customer support personal, and extend its marketing footprint. He noted that expansion would double its headcount to more than 25 employees.

“Maybe the biggest change for us will be in investing aggressively into sales,” Duffy said. "We are really developer driven so that is something new for us."