Sequoia-backed CUE Labs, the company behind widely adopted CUE open-source project, emerges from stealth to tackle multi-billion dollar configuration challenge

ZUG, Switzerland, Oct. 30, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- CUE Labs, the company behind the widely adopted CUE open-source configuration language, emerges from stealth and announces its Configuration Control Plane, a central system that will turn enterprise configuration from a scattered liability into a strategic asset. The company also disclosed over $10M in early funding led by Sequoia Capital and OSS Capital, with participation from Founders Fund, Dell Technologies Capital, and leading angel investors.

Configuration errors have caused some of the world's most costly outages: grounding flights worldwide, halting operations at banks and hospitals, wiping out billions in market value, and exposing the personal data of millions of individuals. Misconfigurations are one of the leading causes of outages and system vulnerabilities.

With an industry racing to deploy complex AI systems, this challenge is exploding. The intricate web of models, data pipelines, and autonomous agents introduces an entirely new scale of risk, making verifiable and robust configuration more critical than ever. "Configuration is one of the least understood and often costly problems in modern software systems," said Bill Coughran, partner at Sequoia Capital. "and in a world that heavily relies on AI-agents, CUE can provide the necessary guardrails to keep systems stable."

CUE Labs has steadily built momentum around CUE, its declarative configuration language, with a growing base of users and contributors from organizations such as Microsoft, Fastly, Alibaba, Elastic, Mercari, and Docomo, across sectors including e-commerce, cloud, telecommunications, IoT, and energy. 

With the Configuration Control Plane, organizations can manage, audit, and validate all data, from build-time configurations to runtime payloads, and know upfront the full impact of any configuration change. Its first component, the Central Registry, is already publicly available and delivers a library of verified schemas for secure module sharing and reuse across teams and environments.

CUE Labs was founded by Marcel van Lohuizen and Paul Jolly. Marcel, the original creator of CUE, spent over 18 years at Google and co-created Borg, Google's pioneering cluster management system that inspired Kubernetes. He led the development of Borg's orchestration tooling and the GCL configuration language. Both Borg and GCL are still core 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." Marcel said. "CUE is the culmination of those learnings and helps users to avoid these pitfalls."

To learn more about CUE Labs, the Configuration Control Plane, or unified configuration, visit cue.dev or contact [email protected].

About CUE Labs

CUE Labs is the company behind CUE, the open source configuration language designed to bring sanity to complex software systems. Based in Zug, Switzerland, its team builds a central Configuration Control Plane that turns configuration from a source of risk into a source of reliability. CUE Labs helps organizations understand, audit, and validate all data, from build-time configurations to runtime payloads, preventing outages and ensuring compliance. CUE is used by global enterprises in cloud infrastructure, networking, space technology, and beyond.

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