Oxide raises $200M Series C

https://oxide.computer/blog/our-200m-series-c

by igrunert • 5 months ago

614 325 5 months ago

gclawes• 5 months ago

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

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.

ubercore• 5 months ago

If they can scale down the hardware to something close to homelab-ish in price, would be great marketing and way to build expertise to have their big boy solution promoted at workplaces. Probably not a priority at their stage though.

9dev• 5 months ago

Prices start around 800k last time I heard, I don't know if that fits within what you consider a premium or not :-)

ryukoposting2• 5 months 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.

zozbot23414• 5 months ago

Their engineered power and cooling solutions are all for rack-scaled hardware, doing a NUC wouldn't make sense. Now a silent and efficiently cooled studio-sized rack with enough hardware (including AMD GPUs) for reasonably quick AI inference with the latest local models, that's something that they could do and be quite popular.

buchanae• 5 months ago

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

cmrdporcupine• 5 months ago

Many homelab users are actually building things out in an effort to learn tooling that they will then use at work. Or just out of intellectual interest.

TimTheTinker2• 5 months 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.

pronaosk2• 5 months 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."

tylerhillery• 5 months ago

Can you clarify what parts of the Oxide stack you're running? Is it the entire control plane?

UltraSane6• 5 months ago

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

alsetmusic3• 5 months ago

That sounds like a challenge.

All I need is some financial backers and I'll happily document the whole thing on a blog and a youtube channel. Now accepting offers.

akshitgaur20052• 5 months 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!!

sweetheart• 5 months 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).

ilogik3• 5 months ago

You should check out their podcast, Oxide And Friends

bsaul• 5 months 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.

IshKebab• 5 months ago

Yeah there's a famous essay "The tyranny of structurelessness" or something like that. The TL;DR is that there is always a power hierarchy. If there isn't a formal one that just means there's an informal one which is usually much worse.

fer• 5 months ago

Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

cyber_kinetist• 5 months ago

I think flat structures aren't always bad - if the organization is geared towards maintenance and care work, it's essential to be as flat as possible. Another good example would be research labs, where experimentation cannot happen in hierarchical envrionments.

For an organization that has definite goals and have to ship a product by a deadline, a flat structure can surely be detrimental to any progress. In an environment of competition (from outsiders) and scarcity, a flat structure will only create either chaos or an implicit form of hierarchy that is even more cruel than what should have been.

lispisok2• 5 months ago

My experience with flat structure is the most stubborn opinionated people end up making all the decisions because they dont budge and get to escape all responsibility for bad calls. Better to have a designated lead.

kev5074• 5 months ago

FWIW there's equal pay but it's not a flat structure

UltraSane6• 5 months ago

It is hard to define exactly what good management is but incredibly easy to tell when it isn't happening.

raskelll• 5 months ago

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

arcologies1985• 5 months ago

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

groundzeros2015• 5 months ago

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

franktankbank• 5 months ago

Another happy couple!

twoodfin3• 5 months ago

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

wasmainiac• 5 months 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.

cj• 5 months ago

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

bri3d3• 5 months ago

I don’t know who they see as competitors in market positioning (ie, who is selling against them on their target buyer’s calendar). But the space is called hyperconverged computing and there are a few other players like Scale Computing building “racks you buy that run your VMs.”

jabart• 5 months ago

From the podcasts they talk a little about their clients. It's people who want something like AWS Outpost but fully disconnected and independent from any cloud and running 100% local.

FuriouslyAdrift5• 5 months ago

More like Nutanix, Xen, IBM, Kubernetes... private cloud, colo, on-premise... etc. There's a ton of stuff (I'd bet the majority) of compute workload in business that is local/colo and not cloud.

panick21_17• 5 months ago

I don't think that is the 'main' competitor. But its certaintly 'a' competitor for companies that already have put a lot of their eggs into the AWS basket.

delusional• 5 months 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• 5 months ago

Turn key well designed onprem private cloud.

specialist• 5 months ago

Yes and:

IIRC, Bryan Cantrill has compared the value proposition of an Oxide (rack?) to an IBM AS/400.

bri3d3• 5 months 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.

FuriouslyAdrift5• 5 months ago

Microsoft and Nutanix have had a hyperconverged architecture for over a decade. Oxide is mostly an alternative to Nutanix or other soup-to-nuts private clouds.

Oxide is a really nice platform. I keep trying to manipulate things at work to justify the buy in (I really want to play wiht their stuff), but they aren't going for it.

fulafel• 5 months ago

So a bit like SeaMicro in the 00's but with more software?

MITSardine• 5 months ago

I'm a bit puzzled because this seems backwards from what I thought had been the evolution of things.

Didn't companies historically own their own compute? And then started offloading to so-called cloud providers? I thought this was a cost-cutting measure/entry/temporary solution.

Or is this targeting a scale well beyond the typical HPC cluster (few dozen to few hundred nodes)? I ask because those are found in most engineering companies as far as I know (that do serious numerical work) as well as labs or universities (that can't afford the engineers and technicians companies can).

Also, what is the meaning of calling an on-prem machine "cloud" anymore? I thought the whole point of the cloud was that the hardware had been abstracted (and moved) away and you just got resources on demand over the network. Basically I don't understand what they're selling if it's not what people already call clusters. And then if the machine is designed, set up and maintained by a third party, why even go through the hassle of hosting it physically, and not rent out the compute?

newsclues2• 5 months ago

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

bmitch3020• 5 months 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• 5 months 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.

TimTheTinker2• 5 months ago

AWS supplies a significant portion (was it something like 50%?) of Amazon's overall profits.

qaq2• 5 months ago

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

shimman3• 5 months 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).

ilogik3• 5 months 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

embedding-shape7• 5 months ago

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

Wouldn't that depend less on where you are and more about your sleeping schedule? I generally go to bed around 04:00Z, up around 11:30Z sometime, seems that would work regardless of location, no?

dcre2• 5 months ago

It doesn’t strictly exclude Europe, we have a few employees in Europe. But as the other reply says, they work slightly odd hours.

patkai• 5 months ago

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

bflesch2• 5 months 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 .

Graziano_M• 5 months ago

Is Jessie Frazelle still there? She is very impressive.

throwaw12• 5 months ago

Bryan Cantrill

dylanowen• 5 months ago

I've seen Bryan Cantrill present at a few conferences and his talks are always the best.

shimman3• 5 months ago

Well one, don't look up to people you personally don't know. Parasocial relationships are not healthy. Look into your local community for people to be mentors or help you.

That said I like Bryan Cantrill as an engineer and leader, but I would never put him on a pedestal.

embedding-shape7• 5 months ago

Tip that will work forever, even when the ones you replace your old idols with get replaced: Don't have any idols.

Listen to the words, don't follow "personalities", don't listen to specific individuals just because of their status. Not a single time have I been disappointed by an idol, because I've made the conscious choice of not having following any. Bunch of smart people say smart stuff all the time, until they don't. I read everything as if I don't know the author, I think more people should do this and less celebrity worship would make the entire ecosystem better. We need less of it, not more.

surajrmal• 5 months ago

It's best to avoid idolizing folks. It can give you a skewed set of expectations and lead you to resent them when inevitably they cannot live up those those expectations (which is unfair to them), and possibly lower your own self esteem if you cannot meet those same standards yourself.

jjice• 5 months 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.

newsclues2• 5 months ago

I love the new podcast but miss on the metal so much. It should be quarterly at least

muvlon• 5 months ago

I used to enjoy it much more before it became just another podcast extoiling the virtues of AI-assisted coding. I have too many of those already.

EvanAnderson2• 5 months ago

Has the audio quality / recording method for Oxide and Friends gotten better?

I have this horrible "completionist" tendency and I got stuck on a 2021 episode where the audio needed post-processing and I just never got around to it.

I loved On the Metal and it was a bummer to fall behind on the new show.

pjmlp• 5 months ago

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

9999000009997• 5 months 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.

grim_io• 5 months ago

You're not changing the world either way, you would just be working for a more demanding guy. Fuck em.

gedy• 5 months ago

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

Honestly these "reasons" they give are usually BS excuses when it basically amounts to they don't like your personality or looks.

sevensor2• 5 months ago

A generic rejection is more than I got for feedback; I never heard back. Still, I thought the process of writing the materials was great. I don’t usually take the time to think about the arc of my experience in a holistic way. Do it for yourself if you do it at all; don’t go into it with high expectations for feedback and you won’t be disappointed.

pfraze• 5 months ago

If you went through multiple rounds it likely means they were seriously considering you but ultimately they didn’t get to a yes. If it’s any comfort that means you did pretty well.

The short stints on a resume is likely not the only reason you didn’t get to 100%, but unfortunately you should know that it’s seen as a pretty bad signal. The general expectation is 2 years minimum at a gig. If you have multiple short non-contract jobs it raises the concern that a candidate doesn’t commit to their jobs, or that they don’t do well at their jobs and are getting let go.

pengaru• 5 months ago

Don't underestimate the importance of timing, for both the company you're applying at and the industry/economy as a whole.

As they say, you can't get blood from a turnip.

Writing this comment reminded me of a personal experience, story time:

Many moons ago I interviewed at a mature startup in silicon valley, they shipped a tiered storage appliance and were in the process of pivoting to a new storage medium (think transitioning from spinning rust to SSDs, something like that).

This was in-person, and everything went swimmingly well, before departing they stated an intention to make an offer and I should expect an email w/offer attached within a week. I got an offer letter, and accepted immediately, as I was super excited about the stack I'd be playing with.

A week before the start date I get a call from a founder, they said I couldn't start because their funding round didn't come through. The economy was going through some sort of financial crisis and it was one of the many blood baths where silicon valley startups shuttered by the hundreds overnight. So in essence, this was a job I got fired from before I could even start, wee!

What followed was a pretty frustrating few months of interviewing and not getting anywhere.

But there is a silver lining to this story, that founder who called me sat on the board of other storage startups. One of them managed to get some water in this funding desert, and its founders reached out to me at his recommendation. I ended up building some great stuff over 4-5 years at that company.

zeroonetwothree• 5 months ago

Usually the stated reason is not actually the real reason. They just state something generic that isn’t illegal to admit.

The real reason might be “they didn’t like your vibes” or something like that

robinhood• 5 months ago

So basically you wanted to have it easy - joining a company with a certain prestige and be over the recruitment process in 30 minutes or less.

moregrist2• 5 months 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.

tverbeure• 5 months ago

And lawnmowers.

bcantrill4• 5 months ago

Well, a couple of things. First, the Jonathan Blow episode[0] was over six years ago. Second, it was nearly a three hour conversation -- I don't think I can be accused of not letting him talk? Third, I definitely remember that I felt I had to interrupt him to move the conversation along. Fourth, I had to pee really badly, I was absolutely freezing, and I was quite concerned about missing my flight to New Zealand that evening with my family for Christmas (which I damned near did) -- and I have no doubt that I was not at my best!

I do try to get better at this stuff, and I re-listen to our episodes to improve as an interviewer. If it's been "a few years", maybe you haven't listen too much to Oxide and Friends? I think we've had some wonderful guests and great conversations over the span of the podcast -- though I also have no doubt that it's imperfect, for which you have my profound apologies!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkdpLSXUXHY

panick21_17• 5 months ago

I disagree. I found the 'On the Metal' to be great balance between the guest and the hosts. And Oxide and Friends I would expect Oxide to be big part of it.

And Jonathon Blow manages to talk enough ...

agentultra• 5 months 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.

EvanAnderson2• 5 months 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).

pronaosk2• 5 months ago

As an AWS heavy user, spinning up an oxide VM really does feel so slick.

ge96• 5 months ago

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

kjuulh• 5 months 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

bflesch2• 5 months 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• 5 months 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.

db48x2• 5 months ago

I think https://oxide.computer/product/specifications makes it pretty clear:

    Compute Sleds (Total)         16, 24, or 32
      CPU Cores                   1024–2048
      Memory (DRAM)               8–32 TiB
      Storage                     465.75–931.5 TiB
    
    Network Switches              2
      Switching Capacity          12.8 Tbit/s
    
    Power Shelves                 Up to 2
      Power Supplies per Shelf    6 (5+1 or 3+3)
      Typical / Max Power Draw    12 / 15 kW
    
    Dimensions H × W × D          2354mm (92.7”) × 600mm (23.7”) × 1060mm (41.8”)
    Weight                        Up to ~2,518 lbs (~1,145 kg)
    Max Thermal Output            61,416 BTU/hr
    Airflow Requirements          145.8 × kVA CFM

If you need a rack full of computers that are managed programmatically via an API then this is the machine for you.

sudomateo3• 5 months ago

We're working on making this easier to understand. Stay tuned! We know the last decade or so of using public cloud providers has made people forget that hardware and software are things you can own and run successfully. Oxide is exactly that. Hardware and software designed together to give you the public cloud experience on-premises.

Disclaimer: I work at Oxide.

voidUpdate• 5 months 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?

drakenot• 5 months 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.

mcmcmc• 5 months ago

Yep, it’s basically slick hyperconverged infrastructure that you can buy a rack at a time without a subscription license.

nradov• 5 months 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.

sixhobbits• 5 months ago

I listened to this recently which did a great job explaining the challenges that companies face when going 'on prem' and the hard problems that oxide is solving

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-history-of-se...

mrweasel• 5 months 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.

zozbot23414• 5 months ago

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.

If you don't like vSphere (who does?) you can do all that in Proxmox.

maeln• 5 months 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.

jeffrallen• 5 months 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.

bubblethink2• 5 months ago

All that is fine and well, and I love coreboot, openbmc, etc. as much as the next guy, but how is this a business with growth or scale? In particular, you are not going to sell to the large clouds as they do a similar thing in house, you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here. All you are selling to is on-prem deployments for old(er) school workloads, which to me is a shrinking market to begin with. You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro. I don't get it. But maybe this is the Dropbox comment.

cyberpunk• 5 months ago

… Ancient jvm running under wine with webstart just to get to the remote console? ;) I do not miss those days.

kristjansson2• 5 months 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.

tuetuopay2• 5 months 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• 5 months 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?

jnsaff22• 5 months 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.

zozbot23414• 5 months ago

I don't think any Oxide racks come with GPU's at present, and the power density of modern GPU-centric AI compute is on a rather unprecedented level. Oxide racks are very well cooled but are no match for the racks in an AI datacenter that's literally burning a full gigawatt of power.

neom3• 5 months 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)!

Aurornis8• 5 months 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.

jcgrillo5• 5 months 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• 5 months 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.

unholiness• 5 months 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.

shrubble2• 5 months 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.

zozbot23414• 5 months 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.

twoodfin3• 5 months 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• 5 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0JjG0Qfwi8

Watch the QA.

Basically, they Nvidia ecosystem is to closed for them to add value. And competing with Nvidia is difficult so its not their focus.

colesantiago5• 5 months 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.

Aurornis8• 5 months ago

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

colesantiago5• 5 months ago

I don't see Hetzner getting into bed with VCs and raising $100M or $200M?

How long until Oxide needs $2BN, $4BN or $8BN from VCs, further getting owned by them?

dcre2• 5 months ago

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

neom3• 5 months 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.

colesantiago5• 5 months ago

Unfortunately since they already took VC money they have to keep doing it and each time they do it they do it the VCs would own more and more and would control the business.

I predict in less than 10 years Oxide exits by way of being acquired or an IPO. The enshittification would have already begun by then.

You seem very sure of yourself in how business works! I'm curious now, how did you create your $100MM++ revenue hardware business? I'd love to learn from you. [deleted]

You don't need to create a $100MM++ revenue hardware business to know how this ends when you get into bed too many times with VCs.

We already know it is a huge capex spend (which is why they keep going to VCs) the question is, how many times does Oxide need to go back to VCs to keep raising (even though they said they didn't need to raise?)

I hope they become immensely profitable enough to buy out the VCs stakes and get control back and become independent.

But I am doubtful that Oxide will do that if they keep raising and they will just be sold down the river in less than 10 years.

_pdp_• 5 months ago

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

liamkinne• 5 months ago

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

nz• 5 months ago

So you are telling me that the cloud is not actually made of water-vapor?

toast0• 5 months 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.

kev5074• 5 months 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.

kevinrineer3• 5 months ago

And, interestingly for Oxide, rack scale solutions from HW vendors might not be suited for your company's workload. Their solution isn't all-in on AI, from what I understand.

sudomateo3• 5 months ago

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

choiway• 5 months ago

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

KenoFischer• 5 months 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• 5 months 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.

UltraSane6• 5 months ago

how does it compare to Nutanix?

sergiotapia• 5 months ago

I always thought a company like Railway would be an Oxide customer. But Railway is building their own servers in their own datacenters. So I am really curious who is small enough to buy Oxide, but large enough to need Oxide?

abrookewood4• 5 months 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.

yla922• 5 months ago

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

dagi3d2• 5 months 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

Aurornis8• 5 months 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.

zozbot23414• 5 months ago

Being a few generations behind is kinda par for the course for any server hardware that's put in production, this is not a gaming PC build. Hopefully they're working on bringing their hardware up to date, since efficiency is a key consideration for the class of workloads they're aiming at.

kev5074• 5 months ago

Wanted to follow up on this, new sleds with AMD Turin (current gen CPUs) are shipping to select customers now with general availability very soon. https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/13/whats_next_for_oxide_...

everfrustrated2• 5 months ago

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

yla922• 5 months ago

save money as compared to ? genuinely curious

panick21_17• 5 months ago

You are not buying Oxide to save 'up front' money. In the long the goal is still to save money.

mrcwinn• 5 months ago

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

g-b-r• 5 months ago

Not equity, last I heard

Aurornis8• 5 months ago

and all employees literally have equal equity

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

bix6• 5 months ago

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

dagi3d2• 5 months ago

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

NetOpWibby6• 5 months ago

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

drewbailey• 5 months 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!

spamizbad• 5 months 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.

panick21_17• 5 months 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.

drfuchs• 5 months ago

Can they re-raise it in Series Rust?

bcantrill4• 5 months ago

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

Traster• 5 months 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.

xer0x• 5 months ago

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

singularfutur• 5 months 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• 5 months ago

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

panick21_17• 5 months 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.

wmf2• 5 months 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?

kev5074• 5 months 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_17• 5 months 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?

gigatexal• 5 months ago

Love the team and the podcast. Kudos to them

arjie2• 5 months 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!

kristjansson2• 5 months 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?

shrubble2• 5 months ago

That’s standard practice in many data centers; but you can often pay more to get more amps delivered to your rack.

arjie2• 5 months ago

No, your expectations are not wrong. I'm a small business. A fully stacked AI/GPU cabinet is multiples of this. A single GH200 based server will have 2x2.7 kW power supplies in a 1U form factor. As you can imagine, I am not running a cabinet full of such servers. But you don't need AI power requirements to do normal software. And there's lots of normal software to do!

tuetuopay2• 5 months ago

Having worked in the space, 6kVA is the norm from 10-15 years ago, 12kVA is the standard for regular compute workloads. With HPC/AI all bets are off though.

NetOpWibby6• 5 months ago

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

joshAg• 5 months 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.

aus10d• 5 months ago

I like this!

MaxHoppersGhost• 5 months ago

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

qaq2• 5 months ago

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

LeoPanthera• 5 months 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• 5 months 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.

abrookewood4• 5 months ago

Agree 100% with this. Really want to test it out.

alsetmusic3• 5 months ago

A podcast host / journalist / dev who I've long appreciated occasionally waxes on the value of having a vanity project such as this. The model he compares it to is automakers building concept cars.

kchoudhu• 5 months ago

What valuation is this at?

opala24• 5 months ago

nao gostei do site

Oxide raises $200M Series C

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