Release

Founded in 2019 by Tommy McClung, Erik Landerholm, and David Giffin, Release is a San Francisco-based company providing Environments-as-a-Service (EaaS) for the software development market. The founding team consists of entrepreneurs and systems engineers with over two decades of experience in building scalable infrastructure. Their collective journey includes co-founding CarWoo!, which was acquired by TrueCar, where they later served in leadership roles, and working together at companies like IMSafer and RLX Technologies. This extensive background in managing complex engineering challenges at both startups and public companies informed their mission to accelerate software delivery.

Release targets software development teams, DevOps engineers, and organizations seeking to improve their development workflows. The company operates on a Platform-as-a-Service model, generating revenue by providing its environment management solutions to clients. The core of its business is to eliminate infrastructure bottlenecks that slow down development cycles. The platform automates the creation of on-demand, cloud-native environments for a variety of use cases, including development, testing, staging, demos, and even production. This allows multiple teams to work in parallel, testing code changes in isolated environments without conflict, which significantly speeds up deployment.

The company's key product is an ephemeral environment self-service platform. Its primary feature is the ability to automatically spin up full-stack environments for every feature branch and tear them down after use, which can reduce testing time from days to minutes and lower infrastructure costs. A standout capability is the Release MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, which uses AI to analyze an application's codebase, generate optimal configurations, and facilitate ongoing environment management through natural language requests. This simplifies and accelerates the onboarding process for complex applications. Release also offers "Release Delivery," a service for software vendors to ship and manage their applications within their customers' own on-premises or private cloud environments. The company has secured $22.8 million in funding from notable investors including Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital, and CRV.

Keywords: Environments-as-a-Service, EaaS, ephemeral environments, software development lifecycle, DevOps, cloud-native environments, continuous integration, CI/CD, application deployment, staging environments, preview environments, development workflows, infrastructure automation, Tommy McClung, full-stack environments, code deployment, software testing, developer productivity, Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital