MetalBear has closed a $12.5 million seed financing led by TLV Partners, with additional backing from TQ Ventures, MTF, Netz Capital, and notable angel investors, including the co-founder of Sentry and the creator of OpenTelemetry. This funding comes as enterprises struggle with a growing disconnect between local code development and the complex cloud environments their applications ultimately run in.
Modern software increasingly relies on microservices, which means developers often work on individual components that depend on dozens or hundreds of other services. Until now, engineers have had to mimic these services locally using simplified mocks or queue up for shared staging environments, resulting in delays that can span from hours to days. Some organizations even spend millions on dedicated per-developer cloud clusters only to discover they still face lengthy deployment cycles and maintenance overhead.
mirrord, MetalBear’s open source solution, addresses this bottleneck by creating a seamless bridge between a developer’s local machine and the true cloud environment. By flipping a switch in an integrated development environment, engineers can run their code against real databases, queues, APIs, and other services without writing deployment scripts or waiting for a pipeline to finish. The tool intercepts low-level input and output operations and proxies them directly to the live infrastructure.
Thousands of developers at leading technology firms—among them major players in hardware, cloud services, and consumer electronics—have already adopted mirrord. Early users report test iteration times that are up to 80 percent faster and a significant drop in production bugs. The enterprise edition extends these benefits to teams, enabling multiple developers to share a single staging environment without data conflicts. Traffic routing and queue partitioning ensure that each engineer sees only the data and requests relevant to their work.
Behind mirrord is a team with deep roots in cybersecurity and high-performance systems, drawn from leadership roles at a behavioral analytics company. Their system-level expertise has made it possible to support complex production-grade Kubernetes clusters, including air-gapped setups and intricate service meshes, without requiring changes to the underlying infrastructure.
How the funding will be used: With the new funding, MetalBear plans to expand its engineering and support teams, accelerate feature development, and broaden integrations with popular development tools and cloud platforms. The company will also invest in community initiatives to grow the open source ecosystem around mirrord, ensuring continuous improvement driven by real-world feedback.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’re witnessing a mismatch in modern development. AI can now generate code in seconds, but developers still face constant friction testing it. Every small change requires another deployment cycle, another wait, another context switch. These interruptions compound throughout the day, turning what should be rapid iteration into a stop-and-start marathon. The entire industry has accepted this as normal, but it’s actually the biggest hidden bottleneck in software development today.”
Eyal Bukchin, CTO and co-founder of MetalBear
“The first-time developers use mirrord, they often can’t believe what they’re seeing. They toggle a button in their IDE, hit debug, and suddenly their local code is interacting with other microservices, remote databases, message queues, and third-party services as if it were running in the cloud. We’ve even seen teams where mirrord lets them run their code locally for the first time. Before, there were just too many dependencies to run locally, so all they could do was deploy and hope.”
Aviram Hassan, CEO and co-founder of MetalBear
“There’s intense focus on AI and developer productivity right now, but most solutions only address code generation. As AI makes developers write code faster, testing and integration become the critical bottlenecks. When every AI agent needs their own test environment, traditional approaches become completely unscalable. mirrord’s architecture is uniquely positioned to enable this new era of development.”
Brian Sack, Partner at TLV Partners
