It’s success compared to the other possibility: not raising money and going out of business. We still cheer when a rocket separates from the first stage and ignites the next. Things going as planned during a risky and challenging endeavor is still a good thing.
Being the "Apple" of enterprise compute (ie. vertical hardware software integration), solving the layers of aggregrate cruft that every single player in the Linux space (including Facebook/Google and other hyperscalers to some degree) have to deal with for compatibility since no one company has enough leverage to clean up poor or outdated legacy decisions in the stack. This is just a bigger market than anything EdTech, and with a real moat. Plus bonafides and actual evidence they are pulling it off, but that's honestly all gravy on top of the market opportunity.
Product-market fit. Based on prior Oxide announcements, they've been clear the raising is in large part about building out manufacturing to meet customer demand. In venture capital investing, once you've found a winner (a company that you have high confidence will be successful and will produce returns at some multiple above your investment), you ought to put much more money into that winner to maximize that return.
In the last round Bryan and Steve talked about being over-subscribed, especially from existing investors in prior rounds. That likely means those investors see exactly what I've described: a winner that's worthy of additional funding to pump their total return on investment.
shill. or fan, prolly.
i don't use the more current word fanboy. ugh.
(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.
(VP of Eng here) I filled out their sales form last year and never heard from them. We're currently spending $900k/year on AWS, and they didn't even acknowledge my request. crazy stuff.
Is this true? If so, how do you know? I have listened to almost of their podcasts. I don't recall them saying there are any type of customer they refuse to sell to. They told a funny story about a sales call with a US national laboratory. They went into the call assuming they would be asking for supercomputer. Instead, they learned they need a bunch of regular rack compute, not all supercomputers.
Also, the OP did not say they are a SaaS company. They only said they spend 900K USD per year with AWS.
I also think they work with government customers. I saw an open job position on their website requiring TS/SCI security clearance and full scope polygraph.
We had the opposite experience. We contacted them through their form this year and they were happy to discuss with us even when we communicated from the beginning we wouldn't be customer in the short to medium term and even for single rack systems.
You are 100% correct but you’d be shocked at the mortal terror that “self hosting” inflicts in the minds of even people who should really know better.
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.”
we spend 2-2.5M a year I wouldn’t consider us their product scale yet.
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.
I can't think of an outcome that would be more odious to Steve Tuck and Brian Cantrill. Brian in particular still talks about the soul-crushing experience of Oracle's hostile takeover of Sun Microsystems.
I doubt that. Oxide was founded by a bunch of ex-Sun people who have already been burned by the Oracle acquisition. If you read through what they say, their company values, and how they act, it's pretty clear their intent is to grow a sustainable long-term business and they're not looking for an exit.
Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? Seems like their "secret sauce" is a software stack that "just works" more than any actual special feature of the hardware.
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).
I wonder what's the selling point at that scale. If your ~monthly~ cloud spend ends in "M", you can easily justify hiring the talent needed to wrangle conventional bare-metal (in fact you can do so at much lower spends, but at these spends it becomes a rounding error).
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.
Just like the last Oxide post, I just have to say how excited I am for their product as a concept. I really hope to see them continue to do well!
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.
I've seen posts about Oxide for years now, but do they actually ship hardware? I've never seen images, or posts about companies with their new Oxide Thingamajig™
> 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.
> 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
left hand: governance gaps, privacy, owning instead of renting
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
I've been following closely and have been both very impressed with what they're building but also very disappointed. They have a great vision for a seamless hardware project, but completely missed the point of what the software automation to tie it all together should look like.
I'd love to give Bryan Cantrill or ahl a 30 min demo. Feel free to ping!
Woot!, they are on a tear:
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...
I don’t know who needs to hear this but raising a ton of money is not success.
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.
> I don’t know who needs to hear this but raising a ton of money is not success.
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.
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Good points.
>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.
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It’s success compared to the other possibility: not raising money and going out of business. We still cheer when a rocket separates from the first stage and ignites the next. Things going as planned during a risky and challenging endeavor is still a good thing.
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It's success, just not what you consider success.
- stupid question: how do you go about raising that kinda money consistently
- 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
Being the "Apple" of enterprise compute (ie. vertical hardware software integration), solving the layers of aggregrate cruft that every single player in the Linux space (including Facebook/Google and other hyperscalers to some degree) have to deal with for compatibility since no one company has enough leverage to clean up poor or outdated legacy decisions in the stack. This is just a bigger market than anything EdTech, and with a real moat. Plus bonafides and actual evidence they are pulling it off, but that's honestly all gravy on top of the market opportunity.
9 replies →
Product-market fit. Based on prior Oxide announcements, they've been clear the raising is in large part about building out manufacturing to meet customer demand. In venture capital investing, once you've found a winner (a company that you have high confidence will be successful and will produce returns at some multiple above your investment), you ought to put much more money into that winner to maximize that return.
In the last round Bryan and Steve talked about being over-subscribed, especially from existing investors in prior rounds. That likely means those investors see exactly what I've described: a winner that's worthy of additional funding to pump their total return on investment.
It is easier to raise >$100M than few million.
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lol why are you cheering?
Because they now have money to do cool stuff?
perhaps they like their work
shill. or fan, prolly. i don't use the more current word fanboy. ugh.
(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.
(VP of Eng here) I filled out their sales form last year and never heard from them. We're currently spending $900k/year on AWS, and they didn't even acknowledge my request. crazy stuff.
They work with HFT/quant firms. Look at some of their former engineers who are now at matX.
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.
Is this true? If so, how do you know? I have listened to almost of their podcasts. I don't recall them saying there are any type of customer they refuse to sell to. They told a funny story about a sales call with a US national laboratory. They went into the call assuming they would be asking for supercomputer. Instead, they learned they need a bunch of regular rack compute, not all supercomputers.
Also, the OP did not say they are a SaaS company. They only said they spend 900K USD per year with AWS.
2 replies →
I also think they work with government customers. I saw an open job position on their website requiring TS/SCI security clearance and full scope polygraph.
1 reply →
We had the opposite experience. We contacted them through their form this year and they were happy to discuss with us even when we communicated from the beginning we wouldn't be customer in the short to medium term and even for single rack systems.
How did that compare to the big firms? HPE, Dell, and so on.
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Hit me up @oxidecomputer.com
This is an embarrassing response.
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If your CIO is not ideologically averse on paying people instead of paying jeff bezos, you can save money even buying dell.
You are 100% correct but you’d be shocked at the mortal terror that “self hosting” inflicts in the minds of even people who should really know better.
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.”
31 replies →
we spend 2-2.5M a year I wouldn’t consider us their product scale yet.
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.
I mean its capex vs opex, assuming a 5 year deprecation period thats 1.2 million isnt too bad, its 10% of their aws spend.
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Logical.
They probably will be aquihired by someone like Broadcom.
I can't think of an outcome that would be more odious to Steve Tuck and Brian Cantrill. Brian in particular still talks about the soul-crushing experience of Oracle's hostile takeover of Sun Microsystems.
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I doubt that. Oxide was founded by a bunch of ex-Sun people who have already been burned by the Oracle acquisition. If you read through what they say, their company values, and how they act, it's pretty clear their intent is to grow a sustainable long-term business and they're not looking for an exit.
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I expect the majority of Oxide's customers are actively trying to escape Broadcom's VMWare hell. Can't see how something like that would make sense.
3 replies →
Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? Seems like their "secret sauce" is a software stack that "just works" more than any actual special feature of the hardware.
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).
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tbf they are probably looking for customers with cloud spend ending in 'm'
I wonder what's the selling point at that scale. If your ~monthly~ cloud spend ends in "M", you can easily justify hiring the talent needed to wrangle conventional bare-metal (in fact you can do so at much lower spends, but at these spends it becomes a rounding error).
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.
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Well that isn't that much. $1M / month feels more like it.
Forbid a business can grow, haha
Say you are spending $1M. Round up. Or even 0.9M. Their sales might only return inquiries with cloud costs ending in M.
Just like the last Oxide post, I just have to say how excited I am for their product as a concept. I really hope to see them continue to do well!
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.
$400m of Simpsons references is undeniably a good use of VC.
Is is a perfectly cromulent use of capital.
I've seen posts about Oxide for years now, but do they actually ship hardware? I've never seen images, or posts about companies with their new Oxide Thingamajig™
We've shipped kind of a lot of hardware at this point!
there are even images of it on our website!
The CEO of Shopify tweeted about it at one point:
* https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1793798092212367669
as far as I can tell, yes?
It seems like Jane street and lawrence national laboratory are two confirmed customers.
With those two names it makes more since that I haven't seen anything regarding their use. Not exactly Joe Schmoe LLC as customers.
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I couldn't find any evidence Jane Street is a customer, only that Jane street is an investor. Do you have a source for that?
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Most of their customers wouldn't be the type to let others know.
Furthermore, do they ship only to the US or can those racks be bought elsewhere too?
Elsewhere! We’re completing compliance testing to deliver to Europe.
I will implicitly trust anything Jessie Frazelle works on. Rare combination of taste, skill, and passion.
She stepped down several years ago.
She was still listed as an advisor in some capacity, but she moved on to a different startup.
From a 2024 interview:
> 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
* https://www.linkedin.com/company/zoodotdev/
* https://zoo.dev
2 replies →
yep, another fan here!
They just raised $200M in February and $100M a year ago.
Must be a pain scaling hardware procurement in a market where everything is overpriced.
Preparing for an IPO maybe?
Funding RAM purchases...
So with all the money raised, it's telling me there is a chance of a home-lab Oxide rack :-) (Congrats guys)
Wish I could have heard back about my job application there. It looks like a really exciting place to work.
Same, especially given how long that app specifically takes.
left hand: governance gaps, privacy, owning instead of renting
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
I've been following closely and have been both very impressed with what they're building but also very disappointed. They have a great vision for a seamless hardware project, but completely missed the point of what the software automation to tie it all together should look like.
I'd love to give Bryan Cantrill or ahl a 30 min demo. Feel free to ping!
[dead]
Preempted the blog post.
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.
The real question is why did Steve Klabnik leave
Exactly what I said here: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/i-see-a-future-in-jj/
I am still a huge fan and supporter of Oxide, and I'm really glad to see them still doing well.
Just read the post you linked but didn't really get it. You left oxide to build something on jj?
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