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Oxide raises $200M Series C

614 points| igrunert | 20 days ago |oxide.computer

335 comments

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Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.

KenoFischer|19 days ago

Congratulations to the Oxide team! It's a tough market out there :)! I'm still personally frustrated that I don't get to play with the hardware (too expensive for our internal server needs; not the right fit for our datacenter partners/customers), but I'm excited to see that they're successful and hopefully they'll come around to my use case eventually :). In the meantime, I appreciate that they're building largely in the open - every once in a while I'll glance at their issue tracker for light bedtime reading. Just recently we had some fun internally throwing our controls software at their thermal loop as a usage example - it's often hard to find compelling real-world systems to use as openly sharable examples (of course we have interesting customer problems, but that's all NDA'd), so having companies build real stuff in the open is fantastic. Great company, wish them the best.

cmdrk|19 days ago

> too expensive for our internal server needs; not the right fit for our datacenter partners/customers

You and me both. They're doing neat stuff, but I wonder how many other potential customers feel that way too.

What is Oxide's market? It feels a bit like advanced alien technology that is ultimately a little too weird and expensive for most enterprises to adopt.

abrookewood|19 days ago

Yeah, me too. I know that they have already explained why they can't, but I'd love for them to build a mini box that we could try it out on.

shimman|19 days ago

Oxide is the only company where I check the careers page hoping that they have a position which I can apply to.

Happy to see their success. Especially so if you've been following their journey through their podcasts (easily the best tech podcast out there if you care about your craft; no filler, all killer).

999900000999|19 days ago

I actually did apply, The mere application takes hours upon hours, and for what a generic rejection email.

This isn't the worst though, I recently went through an interview with another startup company, and after six interviews and a take-home project I found myself getting the same generic rejection. The CEO went out of his way to tell me he didn't like my resume since I've had to hop around a little bit to stay employed.

Concerns that should have been handled in the initial call, somehow get pushed back till after I've wasted monumental amount of time.

Things are looking up though, I'm starting a job soon and the entire interview process was more or less a 30 minute phone call with the technical manager. That's it, two days later or so I had a verbal offer. I don't need to change the world, I need to pay my rent.

jjice|19 days ago

Oxide and Friends is the only computing podcast I listen to anymore. It's a bunch of fun and they have insights I actually value.

The original On The Metal podcast they did is incredible too. The interviews they had with computing legends are just fantastic.

patkai|19 days ago

Same here. As a teenager I dreamt about working for SUN. Oxide comes close in a way.

pjmlp|19 days ago

I already know it is out of my league, however the podcast is great to listen to.

ilogik|19 days ago

+1 for the podcast.

I would try to apply but as far as I know they require 4 hours overlap with PST which excludes Europe

moregrist|19 days ago

I really tried to like the podcast. It’s been a few years, so maybe it’s improved.

The topics were good. The guests were great.

But Bryan Cantrill was just terrible at letting his guests actually talk.

Bryan, if you’re listening, please let your guests talk. We have a large amount of content on YouTube if we want to hear the Bryan Cantrill take on, well, anything and everything. And it’s often amusing and sometimes right.

People don’t tune in to a podcast with guests to hear the host pontificate. They tune in to hear the guest, and sometimes the guest/host dynamic. When the host talks over the guest, you don’t get either.

After the Jonathon Blow episode, I gave up. Dude had interesting things to say about C, C++, and Rust, but most of what we got was Bryan talking about Rust. I guarantee anyone tuning into the Oxide podcast knows Bryan Cantrill’s opinions about Rust. And firmware. And Oracle. And Linux. Etc. etc.

Let your guests talk.

agentultra|19 days ago

I applied last year. But they had too many candidates apply to consider my application.

This is good news for them. I expect there will be more competition for positions there should any open up.

EvanAnderson|19 days ago

Working for them would be cool, but just getting to work with their gear would be great. I am so tired of commodity Dell x86 servers (and garbage drivers, management hardware, etc) and support technicians who have no resources to actually support the hardware (beyond telling me to update the firmware and pray).

ge96|19 days ago

I try to listen to the podcast the main guy's brain seems to be on overdrive can barely talk

bflesch|19 days ago

Can you name some people who are working there and who you look up to? I need some new idols after the old idols all went up in MAGA and Epstein files .

akshitgaur2005|19 days ago

I just came to know about Oxide the other day, and god damn if it is not a dream workplace! High salary, flat structure, a large open-source presence, and maybe much more! Their blogs are really good too.

I am an undergraduate right now and looking at the people working there, it doesn't seem likely they would hire a fresh grad, I think I have found the yardstick I am going to measure myself by going forward, "Am I skilled enough that I could work at Oxide?". Hope more companies follow suit in putting the people forward!!

bsaul|19 days ago

After a recent experience with flat structures, i tend to be really suspicious. My experience was a total mess of organization, with slack bipping all the time, and nobody "in charge" of maintaining common sense in the architecture, with a long term vision.

Total chaos.

sweetheart|19 days ago

This is my first time hearing of Oxide, but I had the same initial thought after reading this blog post then poking through their site. The degree of careful thought put into their policies and culture is really impressive, at least from the outside. Good for them, I hope they continue to be in a position to have that luxury (genuinely).

raskelll|19 days ago

I always felt the same every since I learnt about the company. Can't think of a more rewarding place to work at.

ilogik|19 days ago

You should check out their podcast, Oxide And Friends

wasmainiac|19 days ago

Could someone explains to me what the secret is here? Apart from the fancy marketing, is it the full integration? The hardware? It took me a while to find an actual picture of one of the modules.

bri3d|19 days ago

They’re players in a newish market segment called “hyperconverged,” basically “you buy a rack and it runs your workload, you don’t worry about individual systems/interconnect/networking etc because we handled it.”

Oxide seem to be the best and most thorough in their space because they have chosen to own the stack from the firmware upwards. For someone who cares in that dimension they are a clear leader already on that basis alone, for other buyers who don’t, hopefully it also makes their product superior to use as well.

bmitch3020|19 days ago

Rack scale computing, on both the software and hardware side. That means building custom network switching, power management, etc, in a turn key solution that drops in to a customer's data center. Unbox it, plugin a few connections, make a few configuration settings, and start deploying. It's the on-prem response to the cloud for companies running things at scale.

treis|19 days ago

Companies spend an eye watering amount of money on AWS relative the underlying hardware cost. There's definitely a market for something like a mainframe that runs K8s, Postgres, Redis, and the like where you buy once and then run forever.

I don't know if it's true or not but it seems like our AWS bill is something like paying the full purchase price of the underlying hardware every month.

delusional|19 days ago

The selling point, from the looks of it, is an on-prem cloud where you own the hardware.

For the business guys they're focusing on price and sovereignty. Owning your business. For technical people they are focusing on quality. Not having to deal with integration bugs.

msh|19 days ago

Turn key well designed onprem private cloud.

cj|19 days ago

Related question: Are services like AWS Outpost from public clouds the main competitor for Oxide?

newsclues|19 days ago

Owning instead of renting, for cost and control, without giving up the benefits of the cloud.

qaq|19 days ago

You can get same type of hardware/software setup that hyperscailers use for their datacenters for your on-prem workloads.

arjie|19 days ago

I get the whole x CPUs y RAM story (it's akin to how clouds sell) and that often makes sense in the cloud, but when managing my datacenter operations a big constraining point is compute / kW. At 30 A / 208 V at 85% efficiency I've got 5 kW to work with per cabinet. If I'm putting in low core density slow machines I've got to do a lot more management than if I'm using my Epyc 9755 based servers. This is a practical constraint not just a theoretical "oh I want the latest and greatest". It's just that I can't really justify using up 4U and a kW on an Epyc 7003 series. The compute density just isn't there for the power use. The old chips are practically deadweight.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear of the raise because the team seems exceptional (judging by the posts you guys write and they have written prior to the company) and I love work in this area that simplifies hardware management. Good stuff, good luck, and congratulations!

kristjansson|19 days ago

> 5 kW to work with per cabinet

have my expectations been shot by reading too much about Nvidia's latest and greatest, or does this seem quite low?

gclawes|19 days ago

If I could use the Oxide stack in a homelab form factor, I would be so happy...

pronaosk|19 days ago

You can! There are plenty of us running various minis or old equipment. The non-gimlet deploy pattern supports virtual networking with x86_64 "sleds."

ryukoposting|19 days ago

I was thinking this, too. Here's an even crazier thought: don't even make it rack mount. Make it NUC-sized. Two PB&Js stacked on top of each other, that's the form factor. EC2 except it lives under the couch.

TimTheTinker|19 days ago

All of their software is open-source, including the firmware. I bet this is actually possible for a subset of their tools.

Step 1 could be to get Illumos running on a local x86-64 machine.

buchanae|19 days ago

I'm interested, tell me more. What about Oxide attracts a homelab user?

embedding-shape|19 days ago

Yeah, a small-scale rack for home would be great to replace the beowulf cluster me and others are still stuck with. I'd probably pay a premium for it, given what I can tell from their product material.

UltraSane|18 days ago

The rack has custom Intel Tofino based switch that uses P4 to do network magic. Hard to put this in a home lab.

spamizbad|19 days ago

I'll say: You made the right call striking while the iron is hot. My employer did one of those "Didn't need to but did it anyway" rounds and it was critical for a successful exit that came years later.

LeoPanthera|19 days ago

I say this every time Oxide comes up, and I know that I will never get my wish, but if they ever ventured into the "homelab" market with smaller products, they can have all my money.

nickpeterson|19 days ago

I’m sure it wouldn’t be profitable for them, but I feel like having some vendor sell a ‘reference machine’ that they know could run the core OS well would be a good in between. Someone like Framework selling a workstation looking desktop in a specific reference config couldn’t be too bad. Feels like just enough to get a community started. Most tasks really don’t need bleeding edge hardware anymore, the thing could go years without hardware changes.

voidUpdate|19 days ago

I'm confused what their product is... "The cloud you own"? Isn't that just... a server? Sure, it looks like a very nice server, but is there anything special about it apart from that?

jeffrallen|19 days ago

If you have ever struggled with a server whose bios won't netboot because there's a misconfiguration on the switch, or the Ethernet cable is not coded right for the speed of the server's card (because your vendor silently "upgraded" you to 25 Gbit because they were out of 10 Gbit cards), and then when it does boot, it is thermally throttled because it's tiny fans happen to be blowing in the one spot where your electrician tied a bundle of electric cables 10 cm thick, and then once you get the thermal throttling problem solved, you find out your version of IPMItool is incompatible with some stupid extension your server vendor defaulted to "on", then you might understand why Oxide is a good deal.

If you idea of installing a server is "terraform", you're not going to get it.

nradov|19 days ago

Nothing particularly special. Their proprietary technology gives you some minor improvements in performance, reliability, and power efficiency relative to what you could assemble into a rack yourself. But more importantly for large enterprise customers they give you a single throat to choke: if something doesn't work then you can call them up to fix it with some assurance that it will get handled quickly. They won't point fingers at another vendor.

mrweasel|19 days ago

While I haven't looking into it all that deeply, I'd say it's a replacement for vSphere and cobbled together hardware and networking, all with a centralized management interface/API.

Traditional hosting still, to some extend, struggle to provide the API, on demand, drive requirements for modern developers, who expect to be able stand up a bunch of virtual machines in a minute or so, especially if you also want a new private network, maybe some IPs and storage pools.

Having a single provider for your entire stack, software, hardware and network avoids the annoying back and forth with vendors, blaming each other. Having just one support contract for your entire stack is a pretty large plus.

maeln|19 days ago

It's more than a server, it's the whole rack with networking and all that, integrated and with unified management.

There is some company who for reason X and Y rather (or are obligated to) do on-prem for their hosting needs. But setting up a full (or several) racks, with all the required equipment for proper networking, storage, etc, can be quite the hassle. And if you want cloud-like functionality (completely API manageable virtual network, VM, storage pools, ...) it's another can of worm. Having a "plug'n'play" cloud-like system on-prem that do not require several engineers who know 10's of different vendors tech is definitely worth the premium for those company.

drakenot|19 days ago

I think its the end-to-end, integrated nature of it.

API driven, have "elastic resources", etc, etc. Rather than bolting together various solutions you get to have a "Cloud-like" stack in your own datacenter.

kristjansson|19 days ago

A stack of 38x 1U and a switch does not a cloud make.

Slightly less pithy: they're selling rack-scale systems, with power, hardware, network, and control plane software all integrated. Something that presents to the user as something more like API to interact with than a pile of servers to be managed.

tuetuopay|19 days ago

Think "AWS in a box", with the high level features you’d get there. API, Terraform, "managed" products like load balancers, database, etc. You get all that in a turnkey rack delivered to the datacenter or office doorstep.

It’s a step higher than a vSphere/Proxmox cluster.

sylvinus|19 days ago

Love Oxide and what they're building, but I'm not sure raising even more VC money is the way to build a generational company. Quite the opposite? With money you don't need, you're trading faster growth for more dependencies on third parties that will seek a ROI eventually?

Aurornis|19 days ago

Hardware businesses are capital intensive. They need the money.

They also need to grow and iterate faster. Their software stack is great, but their hardware is quite dated in a fast moving industry. This limits them to domains that value their software and security but don’t need the latest hardware for performance and aren’t necessarily concerned with performance per dollar, which is a small market.

jcgrillo|19 days ago

They state:

> ...it's not uncommon for us to be asked directly: "How do I know you won’t be bought?"

Raising ~infinite runway from investors who are already known quantities signals that you can safely buy into their product knowing they're not getting snapped up by $megacorp anytime soon. That's where the faster growth comes from--customers who feel secure in the knowledge that the company isn't going anywhere.

Tuna-Fish|19 days ago

If they didn't buy all the RAM they needed for their near future before the prices spiked, they probably need most of the $200M just for that.

neom|19 days ago

Not necessarily. Supply chains and vendor management into scale is very difficult and very very expensive, I think we prob spend north of $200MM to get to $150MM ARR, but the economics started to shake out thereafter based on CAGR. To do this without owning 0% of the company while still recognizing needing a lot of cash in the system to keep everything lubricated, (for example Michael Dell might be fine personally extending a $500MM line of credit to the business, if the business has $50MM in venture funds on some predictable growth rate) - basically you use true risk capital via the smallest amount of equity you can give to de-risk downstream capital requirements. I don't know anything about how Oxide is growing their business so this could be total nonsense in their case, but it's how we built a generational business (digitalocean)!

jnsaff2|19 days ago

There is a gold-rush going on. It needs plenty of compute besides GPU's, this is definitely the time to scale as quickly as possible.

shrubble|19 days ago

As companies grow, their capital needs actually increase, even if they are profitable.

We can hope that this is the case for Oxide, though I don’t expect they are reliably profitable yet.

unholiness|19 days ago

Not sure this is necessarily for faster growth. Riding out the AI bubble's rise and/or its bursting will each present a lot of need for capital and a lot of barriers to raising it. They're not an AI company but they obviously have tons of exposure across the stack to these markets. They may simply be making the call that this is a better time to be raising money than the years to come.

joshAg|19 days ago

God, i am so glad to see these guys succeeding. The sun may have burned out, but the sky is still bright thanks to them. May they be so successful that i can eventually buy workstation versions of their minicomputers, sort of like how they made CoaL for triton.

yla92|19 days ago

Has anyone purchased/enquired about an Oxide rack or currently running one ? any info on pricing ?

Aurornis|19 days ago

Prices are not public, but comments over the years have hinted it’s in the $500K to $1mm range.

Their hardware is multiple generations behind at this point, however. I wonder if they’re starting to reduce the price because it’s hard to justify paying so much for old hardware. They could just be targeting customers who don’t care as much about performance or efficiency as they do the software stack.

dagi3d|19 days ago

I just talk about some comments I read some time ago, so take this with a grain of salt. It was my understanding that if you were spending about $300k-$500k a year in cloud services, it would make sense this type of solution, so the expected price would be something between $500k-$1M depending on the configuration

everfrustrated|19 days ago

Prices are high. You're not buying Oxide to save money.

zozbot234|19 days ago

I wonder how Oxide's basic value proposition changes with the very recent growth in rack-scale and multi-rack (datacenter-wide) compute for AI. Surely these other vendors have tech (particularly around network interconnect) that can be repurposed effectively for the more general private cloud workloads Oxide is focusing on.

twoodfin|19 days ago

Conversely, has Oxide discussed in depth how they see GPU compute?

I’m guessing for their current target market of existing enterprise software it doesn’t matter, but the ownership and economics stories are at least as compelling for matmul code.

panick21_|19 days ago

Wow, amazing. That some serious money. Everybody gets a raise hopefully. Congrats everybody.

What to do with so much money?

An AI product is of course the 'no-brainer', I would love to see them partner with Tenstorrent for the CPU/AI part. I think Bryan described this as Door 3 'doing something crazy'.

A product around AMD APU was talked about, but in a recent talk Brain said AMD doesn't seem to care about that product.

OpenTitan is now getting ready for production uses, maybe makes sense to switch to that in the future. Moving Hubris onto that shouldn't be to big of a lift.

A conventional server without DC bus bar maybe? Not talking about homelab server but something in a class where you can't have a whole rack and the bus bar. The main seller would be the fireware and software ontop to get people into the control plane ecosystem. And you could make Linux boot on it too for more market reach potentially. I'm not sure how much such a platform could share with current system.

An SSD or NIC with open fireware would be great, but not sure if you can develop that only for your own product or if you would want to sell it separatly to make sense. But that would be big departure from the current All-in-One product.

Amazing what you can do when all you try to do is make podcast. Maybe now they have money to bring back 'On the Metal'. I enjoyed the more structured interview style podcast about history of computing quite a bit. That said the more discussion oriented 'Oxide and Friends' is also nice.

bflesch|19 days ago

Their website is so nice and smooth even on my shitty computer, not like the other announcement pages of major companies that only work on state of the art macbooks.

greatgib|19 days ago

The website looks good but it is very hard to know what they do exactly and what they sell, if you can be their customer or not just browsing the website. If you don't know them before.

Like do they sell a service or a product. Do they sell hardware, software or something else? it is very confusing.

dagi3d|19 days ago

If I had millions in my bank, instead of buying fancy cars, I would definitely buy an Oxide rack just for the lols

NetOpWibby|19 days ago

Same, I've wanted one of these things for years.

drewbailey|19 days ago

Congratulations to the team. Oxide & Friends, Bryan, Adam & Team are such a valuable resource to our community. Their podcast is amazing, the problems they encounter, and their willingness to share with the rest of us is not taken for granted!

drfuchs|19 days ago

Can they re-raise it in Series Rust?

bcantrill|19 days ago

I LOL'd -- or certainly snorted. Underrated post, anyway.

_pdp_|19 days ago

I am confused. How do you own a cloud you pay for as a service.

liamkinne|19 days ago

You buy the physical rack and install it in your data centre. It is your property.

kev507|19 days ago

importantly, you don't pay for it as a service, you buy it and it's yours. like buying a cloud in a box, instead of having to build it yourself with various server, storage, networking, and software vendors it all comes ready to use.

sudomateo|19 days ago

What led you to believe that this is a SaaS offering? It's not.

toast0|19 days ago

I don't know how it works for Oxide, but this isn't a new concept, IBM has been doing it since the 1950s. Own the mainframe, pay for the required service contract.

kjuulh|19 days ago

Looking forward to the podcast! Congrats. Had to do a double take, wasn't it around summer last year they closed 100 mil. Wild

Traster|19 days ago

I guess there's two ways of looking at this, way (1) is leaning heavily into what seems at least seems to be top of cycle in a cyclical business, which is likely to be highly problematic when they hit downturn, or (2) doing an Amazon and getting lucky by having a massive war chest to survive the next down turn.

bix6|19 days ago

Anyone have insight into revenue or valuation? Implied $1B Val but revenue guesstimates I see put them at sub $50M?

choiway|19 days ago

How much money do you have to raise to buy a decent mic?

arcologies1985|19 days ago

I speculate this is to help them pass the vendor business risk assessment process at larger customers.

twoodfin|19 days ago

Do you need to speculate? The post says exactly this.

groundzeros2015|19 days ago

I suspect it’s because VCs have trouble finding decent places to put all their money.

mrcwinn|19 days ago

Amazing, and all employees literally have equal equity, just like they did for salaries! Bravo.

Aurornis|19 days ago

> and all employees literally have equal equity

In previous HN threads they said that equity was not equal for all employees.

g-b-r|19 days ago

Not equity, last I heard

xer0x|19 days ago

Congratulations Oxide, it's inspirational to see curiosity, conviction and rigor pay off.

NetOpWibby|19 days ago

Can't wait to own one of their racks someday...or get around to making Oxide at home.

gigatexal|19 days ago

Love the team and the podcast. Kudos to them

kchoudhu|19 days ago

What valuation is this at?

MaxHoppersGhost|19 days ago

These comments/upvotes feel astroturfed and any negative/questioning comments are heavily downvoted.

qaq|19 days ago

Might be because negative/questioning comments sound to be written by people who have no clue what they are talking about.

colesantiago|19 days ago

I'm confused and saddened on why Oxide has to keep raising money (in substitute for growth) and keep entrenching their business with VCs and letting them control business and ownership.

> "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."

From this of course the VCs will back and support Oxide (they are mentally thinking that Oxide will move into supplying hardware for AI datacenters) eventually want their money back at many many multiples and the pressure is there to achieve this.

Can you even invest in Oxide?

I just wish Oxide wouldn't have to keep getting owned by VCs which would inevitably lead to enshittification to pay back the VCs.

If Oxide followed the model of Valve (100% founder and employee ownership, profitable, vast unlikelihood of enshittification or pressure to get acquired or IPO) then it would be a different situation.

neom|19 days ago

How could a massively capex business like Oxide scale in the same manner that Valve did based on the current market movement of the industry that Oxide is addressing? I personally cannot see how that is at all possible. The cash required to back downstream capital in a business like this as it scales without it falling flat is surly well in excess of $6/700MM, if they manage to get by with with only selling 300/400 million of equity, that will be a great outcome for the founders.

dcre|19 days ago

Valve is primarily a software company with zero marginal cost to a game sale.

Aurornis|19 days ago

There’s nothing confusing about it. Hardware businesses require a lot of capital to build the hardware.

opala24|19 days ago

nao gostei do site

aus10d|19 days ago

I like this!

chenmx|19 days ago

[deleted]

qaq|19 days ago

Prevent what? 0xide customers were running on-prem workloads before 0xide they just will have a much nicer way to do it now. >50% of enterprise workloads are still on-prem.

shaklee3|19 days ago

They don't even have GPU systems, so...no?

eigenspace|19 days ago

[deleted]

benjijay|19 days ago

Very cryptic; what are you actually saying here?

wasmainiac|19 days ago

Why? I don’t get it.

willmarquis|19 days ago

[deleted]

BobbyTables2|19 days ago

Having seen what other big players do in the area, I wish Oxide all the best.

The world needs an alternative to vendors who charge top dollar for third-rate integration with all the other benefits of vendor lock-in.

singularfutur|19 days ago

Another $200M for a company whose product most developers will never touch. VCs continue to confuse "hardware that sounds cool" with "business that makes money". This ends one of two ways: acqui-hire or Chapter 11.

linksnapzz|19 days ago

Most developers won't know if they're touching it or not, given their market.

panick21_|19 days ago

Most developers never touch a mainframe or a nvidia h200 either. So were they bad investments? Neither do most developers touch a Cisco Core Router.

Amount of developers touching a specific piece of hardware is mostly unrelated to business success.

The real question is, are there big company with lots of money that buy your product.

wmf|19 days ago

It's been six years and they still won't say "it's Nutanix but better". Is it not better? Does the "we akshually don't have competitors" approach work with customers?

kev507|19 days ago

I don't think we'd ever go with the "we don't have competitors" line, it's not serious. The competition is more AWS, GCP, and Azure than it is Nutnaix though, they can't provide a similar experience or economic value when they don't make or control their own hardware. That doesn't mean we never see Nutnaix, but it's not the most apt comparison. As Alan Kay famously said, "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware" - otherwise you'll be stuck at the intersection of support and scaling pains long term.

panick21_|19 days ago

What company specifically mentions its competitors in its advertisements? Do you expect the homepage of the company to be a list of links to its competitors? What is this absurd expectation?