Modern software infrastructure — the layer/s between the operating system and applications — is what makes applications (and AI) runnable, reliable, and flexible at scale. But it's complex: containers, orchestration, continuous delivery, service meshes, infra as code, load balancing, observability, message queues, databases, DNS, and hundreds of other tools and concepts.
We believe enterprises need a trusted vendor who understands the entire software infrastructure ecosystem and provides the very best tools. Proven products with great teams, backed by long-term capital and industry experts. And continued innovation and investment, to deeply engage with the rapidly expanding problem space.
We intentionally define software infrastructure very broadly: as the layers, in production, between the operating system and applications. This includes anything from DNS to observability to PaaS to databases. These and dozens more areas of technology are all tied together by one principle: they enable modern applications to run at scale. We believe the next decade of software infrastructure will be defined by abstraction, intelligence, and autonomy.
We'll see higher-level platforms built on top of today's primitives. Instead, internal developer platforms (IDPs), platform engineering teams, and PaaS-like layers will present simple, product-like experiences: "deploy a service," "spin up a data pipeline," "provision a compliant environment." Under the hood, these platforms will still be powered by Kubernetes (or something similar), service meshes, and CNCF projects—but dev and ops teams will focus on higher-order structures as more of the foundational complexity is encapsulated.
Infrastructure will become increasingly intelligent and data-driven. Observability tools are already evolving from dashboards toward automated insights: anomaly detection, root-cause suggestions, and predictive capacity planning. As AI/ML is applied to logs, metrics, traces, and events, we'll move from "What went wrong?" to "Here's likely what will break tomorrow—and how to fix it now."
We also expect a shift toward autonomous and policy-driven operations. Instead of manual runbooks and ad-hoc fixes, organizations will codify intent—security rules, performance SLOs, compliance requirements—as policies that infrastructure can enforce automatically. Autoscaling, configuration drift remediation, failover, and patching will increasingly be handled by controllers and operators, not humans.
And the boundary of "infrastructure" will keep expanding. Edge computing, IoT, AI accelerators, and industry-specific platforms will introduce new runtime environments, but enterprises will expect them to be managed with the same consistency, security, and observability as their core cloud platforms.
Magpie is putting together the best companies and tools in software infrastructure and will evolve them as needed. Backed by permanent equity investors, our long-term vision permeates every decision.
We work closely with the amazing teams at Emergence Software and The Pritzker Organization.
John is an experienced software CEO, CTO, investor, and board member. He was most recently CTO and Chief Strategy Officer at software testing pioneer Sauce Labs, where he built and led the strategy that tripled valuation in three years, leading to acquisition by TPG. As a former professor of philosophy, he combines practical experience with formal training in first principles and abstraction.
Kit is a veteran of the Kubernetes ecosystem and cloud-native space, with over 25 years in software. He was Kubernetes' first product manager at Google, helped launch the CNCF, and has invested in leading DevOps startups like Chainguard, Sonar, and LoftLabs. Kit is a former software engineer at Microsoft and executive at JFrog and Nobl9 and was most recently CEO of Plainsight, building infrastructure for AI-powered vision.
Shaun has 25+ years of experience designing and scaling distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and Generative AI solutions. As CTO at AutoHub and technology strategy lead for Emergence Software's portfolio companies, he drives cloud optimization, AI-driven platform strategy, and infrastructure modernization across multiple software businesses. Previously, Shaun served as a Principal Architect at Zencore, a Google Cloud consulting firm.
Magpie Software Group is a division of Emergence Software, which is backed by The Pritzker Organization, owners of the Hyatt and other great businesses.
