CUE Labs

About CUE Labs

CUE Labs, based in Zug, Switzerland, is the company behind the open-source configuration language CUE, which is designed to manage complex software systems. The company was founded by Marcel van Lohuizen, the creator of CUE, and Paul Jolly. Van Lohuizen has a notable background, with over 18 years at Google where he co-created Borg, the cluster management system that inspired Kubernetes, and was a long-time member of the Go team. This experience with large-scale systems directly informed the development of CUE, which aims to address the anti-patterns and common mistakes that cause system outages.

The company operates on an open-core model, stewarding the open-source CUE project while concurrently building commercial products. Its main offering is the Configuration Control Plane, a central system that turns enterprise configuration from a liability into a strategic asset. This product allows organizations to manage, audit, and validate all data, from build-time configurations to runtime payloads, to prevent outages and ensure compliance. A component of this, the Central Registry, is already available and provides a library of verified schemas for secure module sharing. The business model involves accelerating the core open-source project while building enterprise-grade solutions that operationalize CUE's capabilities. CUE Labs serves a wide range of clients, including global enterprises in cloud infrastructure, networking, and space technology. The CUE language itself has a growing base of users and contributors from organizations like Microsoft, Fastly, and Alibaba.

In October 2025, CUE Labs emerged from stealth, announcing it had raised over $10 million in early funding. The funding round was led by Sequoia Capital and OSS Capital, with participation from Founders Fund and Dell Technologies Capital, among others. The capital is intended to expand operations and development efforts.