We don’t want to bury the lede: we have raised a $100M Series B, led by a new strategic partner in USIT with participation from all existing Oxide investors. To put that number in perspective: over the nearly six year lifetime of the company, we have raised $89M; our $100M Series B more than doubles our total capital raised to date — and positions us to make Oxide the generational company that we have always aspired it to be.
If this aspiration seems heady now, it seemed absolutely outlandish when we were first raising venture capital in 2019. Our thesis was that cloud computing was the future of all computing; that running on-premises would remain (or become!) strategically important for many; that the entire stack — hardware and software — needed to be rethought from first principles to serve this market; and that a large, durable, public company could be built by whomever pulled it off.
This scope wasn’t immediately clear to all potential investors, some of whom seemed to latch on to one aspect or another without understanding the whole. Their objections were revealing: "We know you can build this," began more than one venture capitalist (at which we bit our tongue; were we not properly explaining what we intended to build?!), "but we don’t think that there is a market."
Entrepreneurs must become accustomed to rejection, but this flavor was particularly frustrating because it was exactly backwards: we felt that there was in fact substantial technical risk in the enormity of the task we put before ourselves — but we also knew that if we could build it (a huge if!) there was a huge market, desperate for cloud computing on-premises.
Fortunately, in Eclipse Ventures we found investors who saw what we saw: that the most important products come when we co-design hardware and software together, and that the on-premises market was sick of being told that they either don’t exist or that they don’t deserve modernity. These bold investors — like the customers we sought to serve — had been waiting for this company to come along; we raised seed capital, and started building.
And build it we did, making good on our initial technical vision:
We did our own board designs, allowing for essential system foundation like a true hardware root-of-trust and end-to-end power observability.
We did our own microcontroller operating system, and used it to replace the traditional BMC.
We did our own platform enablement software, eliminating the traditional UEFI BIOS and its accompanying flotilla of vulnerabilities.
We did our own host hypervisor, assuring an integrated and seamless user experience — and eliminating the need for a third-party hypervisor and its concomitant rapacious software licensing.
We did our own switch — and our own switch runtime — eliminating entire universes of integration complexity and operational nightmares.
We did our own integrated storage service, allowing the rack-scale system to have reliable, available, durable, elastic instance storage without necessitating a dependency on a third party.
We did our own control plane, a sophisticated distributed system building on the foundation of our hardware and software components to deliver the API-driven services that modernity demands: elastic compute, virtual networking, and virtual storage.
While these technological components are each very important (and each is in service to specific customer problems when deploying infrastructure on-premises), the objective is the product, not its parts. The journey to a product was long, but we ticked off the milestones. We got the boards brought up. We got the switch transiting packets. We got the control plane working. We got the rack manufactured. We passed FCC compliance.
And finally, two years ago, we shipped our first system!
Shortly thereafter, more milestones of the variety you can only get after shipping: our first update of the software in the field; our first update-delivered performance improvements; our first customer-requested features added as part of an update.
Later that year, we hit general commercial availability, and things started accelerating. We had more customers — and our first multi-rack customer. We had customers go on the record about why they had selected Oxide — and customers describing the wins that they had seen deploying Oxide.
Customers started landing faster now: enterprise sales cycles are infamously long, but we were finding that we were going from first conversations to a delivered product surprisingly quickly. The quickening pace always seemed to be due in some way to our transparency: new customers were listeners to our podcast, or they had read our RFDs, or they had perused our documentation, or they had looked at the source code itself.
With growing customer enthusiasm, we were increasingly getting questions about what it would look like to buy a large number of Oxide racks. Could we manufacture them? Could we support them? Could we make them easy to operate together?
Into this excitement, a new potential investor, USIT, got to know us. They asked terrific questions, and we found a shared disposition towards building lasting value and doing it the right way. We learned more about them, too, and especially USIT’s founder, Thomas Tull. The more we each learned about the other, the more there was to like. And importantly, USIT had the vision for us that we had for ourselves: that there was a big, important market here — and that it was uniquely served by Oxide.
We are elated to announce this new, exciting phase of the company. It’s not necessarily in our nature to celebrate fundraising, but this is a big milestone, because it will allow us to address our customers' most pressing questions around scale (manufacturing scale, system scale, operations scale) and roadmap scope. We have always believed in our mission, but this raise gives us a new sense of confidence when we say it: we’re going to kick butt, have fun, not cheat (of course!), love our customers — and change computing forever.