Platformatic: Backend Development Platform Company Secures $3.5 Million

By Annie Baker • Jun 17, 2023

Platformatic – the fast backend development platform for developers and enterprises to build modern API-driven applications – announced it has raised $3.5 million and launched a suite of new enterprise-grade solutions. The company will use the funding for extending the platform, growing the team, and continuing to establish Fastify as the go-to open-source web framework for Node.js development.

Decibel led the funding round with participation from Panache Ventures and several angel investors including GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner, Socket founder and CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh, major Node.js contributor James Snell, Tier.run founder Jevon MacDonald, notable Silicon Valley investor Walter Kortschak, and serial entrepreneur and investor Omri Barzilay.

Platformatic’s co-founders, CTO Matteo Collina and CEO Luca Maraschi are known as longstanding leaders in the Node.js community with extensive experience in enterprise deployments. Collina is known as a creator of Fastify, one of the most popular web frameworks in the Node.js ecosystem with over 4 million downloads per month and 3x year-on-year growth – whose users include Capital One, Walmart, and American Express among hundreds of other enterprises. Platformatic extends the capabilities of Fastify with enterprise-grade solutions, managed services, and dedicated support.

The repetitive and tedious task of building, extending, and operating modern backend platform infrastructure at scale for microservices-based architectures requires major investments of resources and efforts across enterprise teams, taking developers away from the work needed to build the applications that customers love. And the platform engineering teams that oversee the web of APIs underpinning modern distributed software are overwhelmed by expectations to build more and faster, without breaking the underlying foundation or being forced to rearchitect applications.

The company solves this problem by seamlessly extending an application’s existing backend so enterprises can leverage the perks of distributed systems with the deployment simplicity of a monolith. And the company’s core product is an instant backend architecture with best-of-breed components for Node.js applications including native database integration, integration with existing CI/CD tools, application templates, feature flagging, IDE integrations, and observability.

Platformatic also launched a suite of new enterprise-grade products that can be self-hosted on-prem, in a private cloud, or on Platformatic’s managed cloud service:

— Platformatic Runtime: Maintain the benefits of microservices but deploy them as a monolithic app for increased resiliency. And the Runtime API consolidates all of an organization’s Node.js applications and microservices into a single unit for deployment, reducing deployment-related risks and bolstering standardization.

— Platformatic Taxonomy: Creating a comprehensive map of microservices connections and dependencies to assess application architecture and deployment risks.

— Platformatic Composition: Automatically composing microservices into one ecosystem with a single public API, guaranteeing low-latency communication.

— Platformatic Cloud: A cloud environment to deploy Node.js applications with pull request previews, rapid deploys and observability built in.

KEY QUOTES:

“Platformatic is born of the combination of the highest quality, community-driven open source with practical enterprise problem solving that only comes from deep experience.”

— James Snell, a Node.js Technical Steering Committee member and Cloudflare Systems Engineer who invested in Platformatic as an angel

“When I developed Fastify, I wanted to create a performance-centric web framework to improve developer experience built on the same Open Source community principles as Node.js. Platformatic is the natural evolution of Fastify, designed to fit into a developer team’s existing or desired infrastructure with a flexible, configurable approach.”

— Co-founder and CTO Mateo Collina

“A modern enterprise needs to keep at pace with user demands without over-burdening platform engineering teams. Platformatic provides individual developers of all skill levels with an out-of-the box, modular platform engineering solution to cut infrastructure development work by up to 90%, while also providing enterprises with a resilient microservices architecture to support their applications.”

— Luca Maraschi, co-founder and CEO

“Platform engineering teams keep reinventing the wheel with components that are virtually identical across companies,” said Chakrabarti. “It holds developers back from building products that make an impact. Platformatic offers the best of all worlds: a great developer experience and peace of mind for enterprises with lower dependency risks and deployment costs.”

— Decibel Partner Sudip Chakrabarti