2023: Series A 44 Million https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-unveils-the-worlds-first-c...
2025: Series B 100 Million https://oxide.computer/blog/our-100m-series-b
2026: Series C 200 Million https://oxide.computer/blog/our-200m-series-c
2026: Series D 445 Million https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1795071/000179507126...
Also interesting from their Series C press release from earlier this year:
> With this large Series C, we have entirely de-risked capital going forward, which in turn assures our independence.
You don't raise this much money this fast without having some success to show the investors.
Oxide raising this much money is a big accomplishment.
>I don’t know who needs to hear this
Plenty of people on this forum need to hear it. Because they think otherwise.
>but raising a ton of money is not success.
Yes. It's not even an accurate predictor of future success.
>With this large Series C, we have entirely de-risked capital going forward, which in turn assures our independence.
Independence from whom?
If they mean from everyone, they left out two important categories:
The Series C givers.
The other big C. Customers.
- like why wont you fund me a few million dollars to build my deep edtech startup
- like what guarantee does this guy give you which i cant
(when older words are good enough, why invent a new word. but I see that as a trend. each new generation wants to distinguish themselves from the past one. So they invent new words as one way of doing that. and some of them get adopted into general circulation or use.)
Unless the two words, fan and fanboy, mean the different things, which i'm not interested in checking out anyway.
Selfishly of course so I can make sure there are more episodes of Oxide and Friends for years to come. Adam annd Bryan's ability to reference thirty year old simpsons episodes is unmatched.
It seems like Jane street and lawrence national laboratory are two confirmed customers.
She was still listed as an advisor in some capacity, but she moved on to a different startup.
> In this episode, we sit down with Jessie Frazelle, CEO and co-founder of Zoo, a company working on innovative software and hardware technology. Jessie shares her fascinating journey, from getting her start at digital agencies to working at tech giants like Google and Microsoft and ultimately co-founding her own successful startup, Zoo.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MkDJMiB_8U
> Zoo makes CAD truly AI-native with a modern geometry engine, readable code, and an editable feature tree at its core, enabling AI to make precise geometric changes without trapping users in a chat-only workflow. https://zoo.dev View our current openings: https://zoo.dev/careers Check out our blog: https://zoo.dev/blog
I'd love to give Bryan Cantrill or ahl a 30 min demo. Feel free to ping!
right hand: nearly every employee of every org buying these things is sending almost everything to LLMs - or using software ULTIMATELY written by, tested by or whatevered by, these LLMs. LLMs that were created by or distilled from anthropic, openai, or google, who see everything SALIENT about what you do, or what ALL of your customers do, even if they are careful about not looking at the specifics of what you do
Man, they are just sucking up capital. If somebody like Antropic has made them the primary 'CPU' rack, then that's they kind of cash you need.
I mean, you could probably get multiple GIGAbytes of RAM with 445M.
I am still a huge fan and supporter of Oxide, and I'm really glad to see them still doing well.
Intel/Barefoot Tofino 2, VHDL/SystemVerilog, FPGA, QSFP28 (100GbE networking), P4 programming.
Their buyers don’t have customer stories. They don’t sell to SaaS companies.
> They don’t sell to SaaS companies.
Also, the OP did not say they are a SaaS company. They only said they spend 900K USD per year with AWS.
My understanding is the full rack is about $1.2M and smallest half rack is about $600k and this was before the RAM and other price hikes now.
You are still going to have some residual cloud workloads(so all AWS won’t migrate ) and HA and DR regions etc plus the maintenance and incidentals (power , connectivity ).
I don’t expect anyone less than 5M spends and high base loads is a good fit for their offering.
Also forget Dell. Check out DataPacket.com and other metal hosters. You don’t need to physically rack unless you are huge or have special hardware or security needs.
The cloud industry has done an incredible job at a kind of soft pervasive propaganda that running stuff is “hard.”
They probably will be aquihired by someone like Broadcom.
I feel like Broadcom with its VMWare acquisition could easily take these guys out if they wanted to (or for that matter, any OEM that has a line of servers + network & storage hardware). They don't, most likely because there isn't actually enough profit to be made there (Oxide having to raise money multiple times might be a hint).
Edit: my bad, read that as monthly instead of yearly. Still, a yearly spend of millions would still make sense to bring that in-house.
The customers will have to deal with it, of course. At least they bought physical systems instead of renting them, so they can use them until they're obsolete.
But they are not independent though, they will be owned by Wall Street should they go public.
Instead they remain in the private markets for a long time and sell secondary shares, just like what Stripe is doing.
I hope they never go public for the reason that Wall Street would own them.
That depends on how much equity they issue as public stock. (And stock classes and voting rights, but you get the idea.)
It would be nice to know more about pricing so the Enthusiast Joe can have a better idea, but it's more a boutique vibe right now.
Just the thing for an ambitious enthusiast to upgrade to from their Raspberry Pi rack!
An in-house team is most likely competing with something like Dell or VMware, not really Oxide. A significant part of Oxide’s value proposition is that you’re buying hardware and software purpose built for each other. Unless you’re also going to go so far as to do all of that, which companies like Google do, of course, it’s not really the same thing.
This matters when your various vendors start pointing at each other when something goes wrong. Oxide is truly “one throat to choke” in a way others just aren’t, and stand by that quality.
(Not to mention other various efficiencies, like power, or removing things like the BIOS and BMC junk that’s in basically every other server you buy right now. And the ability to send attenuation from boot up through the host OS. Just tons of things they’re differentiated on that your in house team just isn’t going to do.)
For me, Oxide is one of the most interesting things I've seen in the computing market in a long time.
With bills of that magnitude, each time I do a little house cleaning and delete some old data, change storage classes, or discover some unused servers... the savings (that are barely a rounding error on their bill) could pay for a whole year of an engineer or a bunch of servers that could power a good chunk of their production traffic.
If you can roll around those possibilities in your head, you start to see how absolutely unique this is and why these extremely sensitive and important customers and industries want this.
Apple is now having that aura, only because they got really really lucky before the money collectors shown up at the door.
Why not the vertical integration of Oracle Solaris servers, IBM vertical integration of IBM i, z/OS or z/TPF, Unisys vertical integration of Clearpath MCP or OS 2200?
The interesting part was the software, management interface, Terraform provider and how everything just fit together. Having storage, network and compute all in a single managed rack package brings a lot of value and brings down TCO. Really appreciated the security group like approach to network policies.
Unfortunately I haven't worked with HPE or Dell recently so I'm not sure what they currently offer.
Not one-time cost, but rather TCO.
You still have a fairly large up front cost ($600k base in 2023ish numbers, probably over $1M now?), and an ongoing support subscription.
I’m pretty sure the dotcom bubble had many counterexamples
The idea behind VC funding generally is that you need large infusions of capital to get to the point where the business becomes sustainable long-term. The first one is the most expensive, and so on. Hardware is capital-intensive compared to SaaS, and especially so in the current environment.
> So if we didn’t need to raise, why seek the capital? Well, we weren’t seeking it, really. But our investors, seeing the business take off, were eager to support it. And we, in turn, were eager to have them: they were the ones, after all, who joined us in taking a real leap when it felt like there was a lot more risk on the table.
> ...
> Our intent in starting Oxide was not to be an acquisition target but rather build a generational company; this is our life’s work, not a means to an end. With our Series C, customers don’t have to merely take our word for it: we have the capital to assure our survival into the indefinite future.
Maybe you could read that and think its complete bullshit and they're lying their asses off. Considering the people behind Oxide and their history, that's vanishingly unlikely though.
The reasonable conclusion is that they would not have raised yet more money if it wasn't due to being offered very generous terms by investors who wouldn't threaten the long-term future of the business.
They've raised a lot of money and there will be pressure for an exit sooner rather than later.
Oxide exists in part because commodity systems don’t work for building a cloud at scale (Joyent). Similarly, AWS, GCP, and Azure don’t use commodity systems, they use hardware that was designed to work together with their software, Nitro being a prime example.
Managing 100s of devices from a mix of vendors is possible becomes itself a massive ball of crap to stick all the pieces together.
Then add firmware management because now there is a plethora of firmware updates to worry about.
And then dealing with networking discovery & orchestration for such setups is an added horror few even try to visualize.
Then abstract all these differences away so one can provision two different vendor’s servers connected to two different vendor’s managed switches in different racks to a new VLAN. And do it with SR-IOV while you’re at it…
Oh, I forgot shared storage… details, details…
Commodity computing is the modern day Tower of Babel.
Yes, it can be done much simpler if one treats all switches as unmanaged, all storage as local, and all networking as flat. That’s just not acceptable for a lot of use cases though…
Bryan has a good take on the incentive structures holding back commodity hardware vendors: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/O8GSWKpK79s
Yes, custom hardware is a significant part of Oxide. You have to build your own to do that stuff, and that’s why they did. I alluded to some of the things upthread.
I found out about this round from this thread, just like everybody else, but
> Oxide having to raise money multiple times might be a hint
That’s not the only reason to raise a round, by far, especially when you, you know, are building custom hardware. It isn’t a SaaS business.
EDIT: here’s another commentor with an example of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176704
There's a reason Apple is consistently one of the top 5 most valuable companies. It isn't because their hardware does anything that can't be done on "commodity" hardware, its that they built a software stack that "just works" and part of that was tight coupling to the hardware.
I've written on this before but Oxide are sitting in very narrow market segment in terms of value and I can't see how it's viable.
I suspect part of this raise has to with Antropic using Oxide at pretty large scale.
If its really true that things will move from public cloud to private in large scale, its not narrow at all.
And they have a pretty clear fitting product range they can expand into.
You may not have heard, but the US government just prints money.
Banks make a lot of it, too.
It was technically possible with (e.g.) OpenStack for years (decades?) before Oxide ever existing, and yet even with such a solution being around, some folks still went with Oxide. (Or, depending on the scale you want to talk about: Proxmox, XCP-ng.)
Depends on what you mean by that. Broadcom cremated a lot of VMware's goodwill in the market.
They are filling a niche no one else is for a small pool of fish with virtually endless pockets.
You can be cashflow positive and still benefit from having a larger pool of cash to throw around, particularly in any situation involving hardware manufacturing.
If you tell your investors "our limiting factor is how fast we can spend to deliver on additional requirements for these new customers", then it can both be true that you're not going to miss payroll for 5 years no matter what happens tomorrow and more cash would be beneficial.
Seems like people missed the end of what I wrote though. We run some bare metal but do not physically handle it. There’s many companies who will rent huge boxes with good connectivity in a data center. DataPacket is the best we have found for price and reliability.
Physically racking only makes sense if you are huge or have special requirements.
These are business decisions, made in terms of core competencies, capex vs. opex, and the difficulties and cost of building out a reliable, sustainable hosting operation that handles all the compliance and security requirements, and the full range of “ilities” that real businesses have to deal with.
The fact that Bob in IT might be capable of doing some of this on his own doesn’t really enter into the picture. It’s not relevant.
There’s a reason that most companies don’t operate their own electricity generation systems. Much the same is true for computing systems.
There’s a sort of arguable sweet spot where someone motivated and knowledgeable can manage their own hardware, even if it’s just rented from Hetzner etc. But that just doesn’t scale.
Once you do try to scale that - not just the hardware but the staffing that’s needed to avoid a bus factor of 1, to ensure the required uptime especially if it needs to be 24x7, to handle disaster recovery, failover, security and compliance issues etc. etc., you quickly run into all the reasons that infrastructure management services and other computing services - i.e., cloud - have won out so definitively.
If you’re small enough that none of those things matter very much to you, and knowledgeable enough to run your whole system yourself, and have the time and inclination to deal with it, go for it! But such people are outliers who are really indulging a hobby more than anything else. It generally makes extremely little business sense.
That's not a narrow legal perspective, it's one look at a very obvious balance sheet. The same could go for hosting.
The capex vs opex theatre is just stupid economics and bad generalization from wall street types.
Almost nothing of it is really real.
And your analogy may impress other glorified salesman, but it doesn't hold water for a second, electricity is fungible, computing is not, electricity is stateless, you computing infrastructure carries your data. Power consumption generally is not a competitive differentiator,computing often is. And of course, the economics IN THE FUCKING REAL WORLD is broken: It is very hard to compete with the prices of the grid, not so in the modern cloud world where hyperscalers captured market enough to feel free to start extracting monopolistic rent from their consumers. And even the premise is uninformed, heavy industry frequently resorts to co-generation, and now, ironically, even data centers projects are exploring it.
Sun would have died, everything completely lost among creditors and that would be it, end of story.
However given their track record designing programming languages, thankfully that did not happen.
They could also have fired a lot of people and likely survived. But the CEO clearly had no interest in that path.
I am using computers since 1986.
edit/update: and the Samsung acquisition was in 2016. So I'd hope the CTO would have _some_ involvement in that decision.
I think perhaps Solaris had a bit of that under Sun but I can't imagine that being the case under Oracle. And I'm not really an enterprise infra guy so can't really speak to IBM or Unisys offerings.
The others suffered "ecosystem collapse". With Oxide you won't be stuck on a "burning platform", your main risk is that the value prop for the hardware & management experience doesn't play out.
Oxide costumers want to run standard VM that they normally run in public cloud.
Do Oracle Solaris serves come with a horizontal scale out cloud infrastructure? As far as I know they don't.
If you're racking up 750/hr putting big law on routine corporate tasks then you are probably messing up. Hire an admin.
In the "Background of the Merger" section of that document, there is an incredibly detailed (and interesting!) story of three companies: Party A, Party B, and Oracle. (As was well-known at the time, Party A is IBM and Party B is HP.) As that narrative makes clear (and contrary to your assertion), it was Sun that rejected IBM's definitive agreement, not the other way around. You can certainly argue that IBM's acquisition of Sun would have failed to complete for other reasons (regulatory and so on) -- but your assertion that "IBM did an offer that was shortly thereafter withdrawn" is simply (and demonstrably) wrong.
[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/709519/0001193125091...
To answer these questions (or accusations?): Yes, I was at Joyent for the acquisition by Samsung -- but I also was not a founder, did not have a board seat, etc., so the involvement that I had, while substantial at some level (working with the Samsung team when they were doing their significant due diligence, for example) was also ultimately limited. My job was to make the acquisition work, not to determine the fate of the company for which I was ultimately an employee.
It's also absurd to call the sale a "sellout" -- the company was not for sale when Samsung came calling. The deal that Samsung proposed was a good and fair one, and if I HAD been on the board, I would have absolutely voted for the acquisition. (It should be said that Samsung themselves had a very high threshold to close the deal -- 97% of shares IIRC?)
And all of THAT said: while I was supportive of the acquisition by Samsung of Joyent (and worked hard to make that acquisition work), when we started Oxide, Steve and I had (and have!) zero interest in building a company to be acquired. Oxide is our life's work (and I mean that "our" broadly, as many at Oxide feel that same calling), and our objective with Oxide is to build an independent, generational company. Indeed, this Series D is all about advancing that objective!
(Those were all firsthand examples; I'm not saying everyone needs cloud providers, but there are reasons beyond "really good salespeople" that people opt for offloading those logistics.)
You dont even have extra organizational overhead. Every cloud first company has a head of devops sitting in the chair where head of infra would be. They somehow wind up with like half the staffing anyways compared to running bare metal.
Also like I said: physically racking only makes sense if you are huge. Managed bare metal is a whole market category and it’s spectacularly cheaper than big cloud for most work loads. For bandwidth it’s like 1000X cheaper. That is not an exaggeration.
Also building high complexity systems that require a big expensive cloud engineer staff gets you status and visibility. In a tight spot you can still blame AWS for problems.
(Reality is not quite so bleak as people are not completely cynical)
Or something as stupid as, "vendor requires $50 failed DIMM replaced under warranty to be returned by UPS instead of chucked into the e-waste bucket, but UPS cannot pick up from DC because the driver can't be bothered to ring the bell on the DC gate".
That one alone probably resulted in our longest ever ticket.
The physical world sucks.
There are also many other alternatives. Example: VPS providers like Vultr which have expanded to offer more traditional "cloud" features like object storage, load balancers, managed DBs, etc. Their pricing is way more competitive than AWS, especially when you consider bandwidth.