Earthly

Earthly is a build and CI automation platform that has evolved into engineering guardrails for the AI development era. The company is backed by prominent technology investors including Spencer Kimball (CEO of Cockroach Labs), Innovation Endeavors (founded by Eric Schmidt), Olivier Pomel (CEO of Datadog), Jeff Dean (Chief Scientist at Google), and Mitch Wainer (cofounder of DigitalOcean). The platform addresses the fundamental challenge of enforcing engineering standards at scale by converting scattered documentation such as coding guidelines, compliance checklists, and configuration standards into deterministic enforcement rules that run automatically in pull requests and AI agent workflows. The system integrates with popular AI coding tools including Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex, ensuring that AI-generated code adheres to the same standards as human-written code. Over 200 built-in guardrails cover areas such as test coverage thresholds, Kubernetes resource limits, software bill of materials generation, security vendor coverage verification, and CODEOWNERS enforcement. Teams can define custom guardrails using a declarative configuration language and apply them gradually across their codebase, starting with advisory warnings before escalating to blocking enforcement. The platform provides centralized instrumentation and reporting, giving engineering leaders visibility into code quality trends, compliance posture, and AI code governance metrics. Earthly also maintains its original open source build tool, Earthfiles, which provides reproducible builds using a syntax inspired by Makefiles and Dockerfiles with advanced caching, parallelism, and cross-platform portability. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and serves enterprise customers across fintech, healthcare, and technology sectors.