Northflank, a cloud deployment platform based in London, has secured $22.3 million in new funding to streamline the process of shipping code for companies. The funding round was led by Bain Capital Ventures and Vertex Ventures US, with $16 million raised in a Series A round and an additional $6.3 million in a seed round.
The primary goal of Northflank is to address the common issue faced by developers in enterprise software – spending excessive time configuring infrastructure instead of focusing on coding. The platform offers a solution that eliminates the need for developers to choose between rigid third-party platforms or costly internal systems that require extensive maintenance.
CEO and co-founder of Northflank, Will Stewart, highlighted the complexity and costliness of current infrastructure setups, noting that developers often find themselves tangled in YAML and Helm charts instead of coding. Northflank aims to simplify this process and make Kubernetes, the container orchestration system that underpins modern cloud infrastructure, more accessible to developers.
Northflank’s platform allows developers to deploy applications, databases, and automated jobs across major cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud. By providing a user-friendly interface and real-time dashboard, Northflank enables developers to deploy their first container to production in under five minutes. The platform currently handles billions of public egress requests monthly and orchestrates millions of container deployments per month.
Stewart and co-founder Frederik Brix, who initially met as teenage gamers, have leveraged their experience in deploying game servers using container technologies to create a platform that caters to a wide range of workloads. This approach has attracted notable customers like Sentry, Writer, and Chai Discovery, with some enterprise clients deploying up to 1,000 microservices in a single project through Northflank.
Bain Capital Ventures partner, Slater Stich, praised Northflank for revolutionizing enterprise software deployment by providing developers with a PaaS-like experience while offering platform engineers full control over the underlying infrastructure. The platform’s consumption-based pricing model and focus on data privacy and regulatory compliance have further contributed to its appeal among enterprise clients.
With the new funding, Northflank plans to expand support for cloud providers, add regions to their platform, and enhance enterprise support coverage. The company aims to become the go-to platform for engineering teams looking to simplify cloud infrastructure deployment and operation. Despite the challenges posed by the complexity of current deployment processes, Northflank remains committed to providing a seamless and efficient solution for its customers.
