The North Flankthe London-based cloud deployment platform, today announced $22.3 million in new funding to help companies ship code faster without having to wrestle with complex infrastructure. Ben Capital Ventures led a $16 million Series A round, while Vertex Ventures US Led an additional $6.3 million seed round.
The startup aims to solve a persistent problem in enterprise software: developers spend too much time setting up infrastructure rather than writing code. Companies currently face an unsatisfying choice between inflexible third-party platforms that scale quickly or expensive internal systems that require large teams to maintain.
“Infrastructure has become too complex, too expensive, and it forces developers to spend less time writing the code they care about,” Will Stewart, CEO and co-founder of North Flank, told VentureBeat. said in an exclusive interview with “Instead, they stay in the grass all day fighting YAML and Helm charts.”
How North Flank makes Kubernetes actually usable by developers
The company’s platform enables developers to deploy applications, databases and automated jobs to major cloud providers. AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azureand Oracle Cloud. North Flank distinguishes itself through a fresh approach to Kubernetes, the widely adopted but complex container orchestration system that underlies modern cloud infrastructure.
“Northflank has got the right abstraction on Kubernetes, which allows us real-time dashboards, whether it’s GitOps, UI templates to define applications, databases and pipelines,” explained Stewart. “We liken it to an operating system.”
The results speak for themselves: developers can deploy their first container to production in less than five minutes. The platform now handles more than 10 billion public release requests per month and orchestrates more than 1.3 million container deployments per month.
From teenage gamers to enterprise cloud infrastructure leaders
Stewart and co-founder Frederick Birx met as teenagers playing online games, where they began deploying game servers using container technologies. That hands-on experience revealed broader applications: “A game server is just a Docker file, just a microservice,” Stewart told VentureBeat. “If you can apply the same automation techniques to any workload, you can enable any software engineer to deploy any workload with the same consistent developer experience.”
This approach has won notable users including The orange, The writerand Chai Discovery. Some enterprise customers now deploy up to 1,000 microservices in a single project through NorthFlank’s platform.
Slater Stich, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, sees Northflank as solving a fundamental problem in enterprise software deployment. “Within large companies, app deployment is usually a slog,” Stich said. “Before talking to Northflank, I almost accepted it as a necessary evil. Northflank is different. By building on top of K8s with the right abstractions, Northflank gives developers a PaaS-like deployment experience. While the platform gives engineers full control of the infrastructure.”
Why Enterprise Companies Are Losing Internal Developer Platforms
Traditional in-house developer platforms require 10-25 platform engineers, costing companies up to $3 million annually. North Flank offers consumption-based pricing, charging for resource usage on its infrastructure or taking a percentage of cloud spend when customers use their cloud accounts.
The platform addresses data privacy and regulatory compliance concerns by keeping users’ data in their chosen cloud environment. “The customer data runtime is running in the cloud account of their choice,” Stewart said. “Their data is in their cloud account in the region and zone they want to operate,” allowing companies to meet different regional data regulations.
The road ahead
Northflank will use the new funding to expand cloud provider support, add regions to its multi-tenant platform, and develop 24/7 enterprise support coverage. The company plans to develop a self-deployable control plane for enterprise customers who need greater control over their deployment infrastructure.
“Our goal is to become the default way that engineering teams deploy and run software,” Stewart told VentureBeat. “It’s still crazy to me that after 10 years of investing in Kubernetes and the surrounding ecosystem, deploying cloud infrastructure and applications is so complex — it’s almost harder today than it was 10 years ago.”
Kindred Ventures, Tapestry VC, Pebblebed and Uncorrelated Ventures also participated in the funding round, bringing North Flank’s total funding since its founding to nearly $25 million.
Credit : venturebeat.com
