Sequoia-Backed CUE Labs Launches from Stealth to Tackle Global Configuration Challenges with $10M Funding

CUE Labs, creator of the open-source CUE configuration language, emerges from stealth with its new Configuration Control Plane. Supported by $10 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and OSS Capital, it targets the costly and widespread problem of configuration errors in enterprise systems.

CUE Labs, the developer of the widely adopted CUE open-source configuration language, officially announces its emergence from stealth, revealing its new product, the Configuration Control Plane. 

Designed to make enterprise configuration a strategic advantage rather than a liability, this system enables organisations to manage, validate, and audit configurations across their infrastructure with greater reliability and transparency.

The company also confirms more than $10 million in early-stage funding, co-led by Sequoia Capital and OSS Capital, with participation from Founders Fund, Dell Technologies Capital, and a group of well-known angel investors. This funding underscores the growing recognition of configuration management as a critical element of operational stability and AI system safety.

A growing global problem in modern software systems

Configuration errors have long been a silent threat across industries. From grounding international flights to halting operations in banks and hospitals, these mistakes have cost companies billions in downtime and lost data. With industries now rapidly deploying complex AI systems, the challenge has intensified.

The growing network of models, data pipelines, and autonomous agents has created a new scale of risk, requiring a more reliable and verifiable approach to configuration. 

As Bill Coughran, partner at Sequoia Capital, explains, “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.”

Introducing the configuration control plane

CUE Labs’ Configuration Control Plane acts as a central system that unifies configuration data across organisations. It allows teams to understand the full impact of any change before deployment, thereby reducing operational risk.

The system’s first major component, the Central Registry, is already publicly available. It offers a verified library of schemas that organisations can use to securely share and reuse configuration modules across teams and environments. This helps enterprises strengthen compliance, improve system stability, and prevent costly configuration-related outages.

The power behind CUE: A proven legacy

CUE Labs’ foundation is built upon deep expertise in large-scale systems engineering. The company was co-founded by Marcel van Lohuizen and Paul Jolly. Marcel, the original creator of the CUE language, spent over 18 years at Google, where he co-created Borg, Google’s pioneering cluster management system that inspired Kubernetes.

Marcel also led the development of Borg’s orchestration tooling and the GCL configuration language, both of which remain integral 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.”

Expanding adoption across industries

CUE Labs has steadily built momentum in the global tech ecosystem. Its open-source CUE language has gained users and contributors from leading organisations such as Microsoft, Fastly, Alibaba, Elastic, Mercari, and Docomo. These adopters span diverse industries, including cloud computing, telecommunications, e-commerce, IoT, and energy.

By helping enterprises manage both build-time and runtime configurations, CUE Labs is setting a new benchmark for reliability and control in distributed systems. Its Configuration Control Plane aims to bridge the gap between operational complexity and predictable performance.

About CUE Labs

CUE Labs is the company behind CUE, the open-source configuration language designed to simplify and secure complex software systems. Based in Zug, Switzerland, the company develops a Configuration Control Plane that transforms configuration management from a source of risk into a foundation of reliability.

CUE Labs empowers organisations to understand, audit, and validate all configuration data, from build-time to runtime, ensuring operational safety and compliance. Today, CUE is trusted by enterprises across cloud infrastructure, networking, and space technology sectors.