How Dagger Is Redefining DevOps with a Code‑First Platform

Nearly four years after Solomon Hykes left Docker, the former founder has quietly been working on a new startup called Dagger, which launched its public beta and announced a $20 million Series A round led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Nat Friedman, Brian Stevens, Idit Levine, Julius Volz, Ellen Pao, and Daniel Lopez.

Dagger, co‑founded with Sam Alba and Andrea Luzzardi, aims to create a "DevOps operating system" for enterprise teams, focusing on the bottlenecks in current DevOps workflows.

Hykes explains that Dagger lets engineers describe their pipelines as declarative models in CUE, enabling pipelines to be expressed as pure code and composed from smaller, reusable actions, bringing the experience closer to traditional software development.

The team is also building the "Dagger Universe," a curated toolkit that developers can import into their Dagger configurations, while allowing users to retain existing CI infrastructure such as CircleCI or GitLab.

According to Redpoint Ventures partner Erica Brescia, Dagger simplifies software supply‑chain management by making custom application delivery pipelines portable, potentially changing the game for DevOps teams.

Hykes emphasizes that Dagger will be open‑source, mirroring Docker's development experience, and that a robust open‑source community is essential for long‑term success.

The company plans to focus on developing the open‑source engine, expanding the team, and later launching managed services, while adopting a slower, steadier commercialization approach.