DEVOPSdigest

Jozu raised $4 million in seed funding.

The round was led by HalfCourt Capital, with participation from Mozilla Ventures, BrightSpark, AlleyCorp, Sentiero, and Union Bay Partners.

The investment will accelerate Jozu's mission to provide security-conscious organizations with AI/ML lifecycle tooling that accelerates AI projects from development to production—without compromising compliance, security, or operational agility.

Jozu provides a comprehensive solution for AI model and agent orchestration, enabling organizations to deploy and scale AI solutions with confidence.

"Organizations are moving from prototypes built with OpenAI and Anthropic, to production deployments using self-hosted models to protect their data and competitive advantage," said Brad Micklea, CEO & Founder of Jozu. "That isn't as simple as grabbing an open source model from Hugging Face - AI models and Agents need to be integrated, tested, secured, and audited throughout their lifecycle. This funding will allow us to meet the rapidly growing enterprise demand for tools that simplify, secure, and speed the productization of self-hosted AI projects."

The seed round will support Jozu's ambitious growth plans for the next 18-months, including:

- Expanding Platform Capabilities – Creating the industry's first extensible AI operations control plane to streamline AI/ML deployment, inference, security, and governance

- Enhancing AI Security & Compliance – Integrating AI/ML security scanning, model lineage tracking, and signing frameworks to help businesses meet regulatory and operational requirements

- Scaling Open Source Adoption – Working with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to establish an open standard for AI model packaging, with KitOps.org as its reference implementation

- Growing the Team – Hiring world-class engineers and go-to-market experts focused on building the future of DevOps for enterprise AI

Jozu's open source standard, KitOps, which is part of the CNCF, has already gained significant traction as the preferred packaging and versioning solution for organizations self-hosting AI/ML models. Unlike proprietary formats that lock businesses into a single vendor and aren't compatible with existing DevOps tools, KitOps leverages OCI (the same standard used for containerized applications), ensuring that AI models are portable, reproducible, and secure.