Northflank’s production workload platform scales with any company and frees developers to ship more code without worrying about infrastructure
Northflank, the workload platform for developers, announced $22.3 million in new financing across a $16 million Series A led by Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) and a $6.3 million seed led by Vertex Ventures US. Additional investors participating in these rounds include Kindred Ventures, Tapestry VC, Pebblebed and Uncorrelated Ventures. Northflank offers a production workload platform that gives developers a self-service way to build, deploy and scale any workload on your own cloud. With this funding, Northflank moves closer to its goal of becoming the default way that engineering teams deploy and operate software.
“Too often, infrastructure complexity gets in the way–customers don’t pay you to write YAML. Northflank gives DevOps and platform teams a better abstraction to manage their infrastructure and automate deployment for their developers.”
As developers build new features, there are too many complex, manual processes between writing code and shipping it to the cloud. The result is slow release cycles and a broken developer experience. Developers must choose between an inflexible, third-party platform or dedicating significant resources to building and maintaining an internal developer platform.
Northflank gives engineering teams a better third option. The product replaces brittle homegrown solutions, which require stitching together disparate tools. With a powerful abstraction to Kubernetes, Northflank offers a real-time, self-service platform for developers to build, deploy and scale their applications, databases and jobs on any cloud. Northflank’s platform gives companies control and flexibility of their infrastructure without sacrificing developer experience. These features improve consistency and reliability as workloads are deployed using composable workflows defined via a UI and Infrastructure as Code.
“Our mission is to enable developers to do what they do best: write code and ship new features,” said Will Stewart, CEO and co-founder of Northflank. “Too often, infrastructure complexity gets in the way–customers don’t pay you to write YAML. Northflank gives DevOps and platform teams a better abstraction to manage their infrastructure and automate deployment for their developers.”
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Companies from leading sports leagues to software companies like Sentry, Writer, and Chai Discovery have adopted Northflank’s workload platform. With tens of thousands of developers using Northflank in production, the platform raises the skill ceiling and lowers the barriers to entry for all engineers working with cloud infrastructure.
“Northflank is the first ‘batteries included’ developer platform that doesn’t suffer from the invisible ceilings that hover over its competitors,” said Keith Adams, former Chief Architect at Slack. “We could have built all of Slack with Northflank–and we would have, had it been available.”
“Northflank simplified how we build and deploy new products,” said Waseem Alshikh, co-founder and CTO of Writer. “With their full-fledged APIs, we’ve rapidly deployed new features, complete with a secure multi-tenant runtime in our cloud, powered by Northflank’s BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) offering. Their APIs have given us the flexibility, speed and control we need — it’s been a best-in-class developer experience.”
Northflank was co-founded by Will Stewart and Frederik Brix, who met through a multiplayer game and began deploying game servers on Rancher and Mesos and, eventually, Kubernetes. Realizing they could simplify workload deployment for all engineers, the two co-founders created Northflank.
“Inside big companies, app deployment is usually a slog,” said Slater Stich, partner at Bain Capital Ventures. “Before talking with Northflank, I had almost accepted this as a necessary evil — if you have a large, complex application that you need to serve at scale, there are a lot of things you need from your app deployment platform, and it’s clear where most PaaS solutions fall short. Northflank is different. By building on top of K8s with the right abstractions, Northflank gives developers a PaaS-like deployment experience while giving platform engineers full control of the underlying infrastructure. We’re thrilled to partner with Will, Fred, and the rest of the Northflank team.”
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