Exclusive: Northflank scores $22.3 million to make cloud infrastructure less of a nightmare for developers

Northflank, a London-based cloud deployment platform, announced $22.3 million in new funding today to help companies ship code faster without wrestling with complex infrastructure. Bain Capital Ventures led the $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 configuring infrastructure instead of writing code. Companies currently face an unsatisfying choice between inflexible third-party platforms they quickly outgrow or expensive internal systems requiring large teams to maintain.

“Infrastructure has gotten far too complicated, too expensive, and it forces developers to spend less time on actually writing the code that they care about,” said Will Stewart, CEO and co-founder of Northflank, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “Instead, they’re in the weeds fighting YAML and Helm charts all day.”

How Northflank makes Kubernetes actually usable for developers

The company’s platform enables developers to deploy applications, databases, and automated jobs across major cloud providers including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud. Northflank distinguishes itself through a novel approach to Kubernetes, the widely-adopted but complex container orchestration system that underpins modern cloud infrastructure.

“Northflank has found the right abstraction over Kubernetes, which allows us real-time dashboard, whether it’s GitOps, UI templates to define these applications, databases and pipelines,” Stewart explained. “We liken it to an operating system.”

The results speak for themselves: developers can deploy their first container to production in under five minutes. The platform now handles over 10 billion public egress requests monthly and orchestrates more than 1.3 million container deployments per month.

From teenage gamers to enterprise cloud infrastructure leaders

Stewart and co-founder Frederik Brix met as teenagers playing online games, where they began deploying game servers using container technologies. This 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 could enable any software engineer to deploy any workload with the same consistent developer experience.”

The approach has won over notable customers including Sentry, Writer, and 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 solving a fundamental problem in enterprise software deployment. “Inside big companies, app deployment is usually a slog,” Stich said. “Before talking with Northflank, I had almost accepted this 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 giving platform engineers full control of the underlying infrastructure.”

Why enterprise companies are ditching internal developer platforms

Traditional internal developer platforms require 10-25 platform engineers, costing companies up to $3 million annually in personnel alone. Northflank offers consumption-based pricing, charging for resource usage on their infrastructure or taking a percentage of cloud spend when customers use their own cloud accounts.

The platform addresses data privacy and regulatory compliance concerns by keeping customer data within their chosen cloud environments. “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 the zone that they want to run,” allowing companies to meet various regional data regulations.

The road ahead

Northflank will use the new funding to expand cloud provider support, add regions to their multi-tenant platform, and build out 24/7 enterprise support coverage. The company plans to develop a self-deployable control plane for enterprise customers who need maximum control over their deployment infrastructure.

“Our goal is to become the default way that engineering teams deploy and operate software,” Stewart told VentureBeat. “It’s still crazy to me that it’s so complex to deploy cloud infrastructure and applications after 10 years of investment in Kubernetes and the surrounding ecosystem — it’s almost got harder today than it was 10 years ago.”

Kindred Ventures, Tapestry VC, Pebblebed and Uncorrelated Ventures also participated in the funding round, bringing Northflank’s total funding to approximately $25 million since its founding.