Northflank, a developer workload platform, announced $22.3 million in new funding, including 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 provides a production workload platform that gives developers a self-service way to build, deploy, and scale any workload on their own cloud. With this funding round, Northflank moves closer to its goal of becoming the default way that engineering teams deploy and operate software.
Through a powerful abstraction to Kubernetes, Northflank provides 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.
Companies from leading sports leagues to software companies such as Sentry, Writer, and Chai Discovery utilize 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 was founded by Will Stewart and Frederik Brix. They met through a multiplayer game and started deploying game servers on Rancher, Mesos, and, eventually, Kubernetes. Realizing they could simplify workload deployment for all engineers, the two co-founders created Northflank.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our mission is to enable developers to do what they do best: write code and ship new features. 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.”
– Will Stewart, CEO and co-founder of Northflank
“Northflank is the first ‘batteries included’ developer platform that doesn’t suffer from the invisible ceilings that hover over its competitors. We could have built all of Slack with Northflank–and we would have, had it been available.”
– Keith Adams, former Chief Architect at Slack
“Northflank simplified how we build and deploy new products. 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.”
– Waseem Alshikh, co-founder and CTO of Writer
“Inside big companies, app deployment is usually a slog. 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.”
– Slater Stich, partner at Bain Capital Ventures
