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Northern flanka London-based cloud deployment platform, today announced $22.3 million in new funding to help companies ship code faster without struggling with complex infrastructure. Bain Capital Ventures led the $16 million Series A round, while Vertex Ventures USA led an additional $6.3 million seed round.
The startup wants to solve a persistent problem in enterprise software: developers spend too much time configuring infrastructure instead of writing code. Companies are currently faced with an unsatisfying choice between inflexible third-party platforms that they quickly outgrow or expensive in-house systems that require large teams to maintain.
“The infrastructure has become far too complicated and expensive, and it’s forcing developers to spend less time actually writing the code they care about,” said Will Stewart, CEO and co-founder of Northflank, in an exclusive interview with Venture Beat. “Instead, they spend all day fighting YAML and Helm charts.”
How Northflank makes Kubernetes actually useful for developers
The company’s platform enables developers to deploy applications, databases and automated tasks to major cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft AzureAnd Oracle cloud. Northflank differentiates itself with a new approach to Kubernetes, the widely adopted but complex container orchestration system that underpins modern cloud infrastructure.
“Northflank has found the right abstraction over Kubernetes, allowing us to get a real-time dashboard, whether it’s GitOps, or UI templates to define these applications, databases and pipelines,” Stewart explains. “We compare it to an operating system.”
The results speak for themselves: developers can deploy their first container into production within five minutes. The platform now processes more than 10 billion public outbound requests monthly and orchestrates more than 1.3 million container deployments per month.
From teen 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 every workload, you can enable any software engineer to deploy any workload with the same consistent developer experience.”
The approach has won notable clients, including Sentinel, WriterAnd Chai discovery. Some enterprise customers are now deploying up to 1,000 microservices in a single project through the Northflank platform.
Slater Stich, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, sees Northflank solving a fundamental problem in enterprise software implementation. “Within large companies, app implementation is usually a grind,” says Stich. “Before I spoke to Northflank, I almost accepted this as a necessary evil. Northern flank is different. By building on top of K8s with the right abstractions, Northflank provides developers with a PaaS-like deployment experience, while giving platform engineers full control over the underlying infrastructure.”
Why big companies are abandoning internal developer platforms
Traditional in-house developer platforms require 10 to 25 platform engineers, costing companies around $3 million annually in personnel alone. Northflank offers consumption-based pricing, charges for the use of resources on their infrastructure, or takes a percentage of cloud spend when customers use their own cloud accounts.
The platform addresses data privacy and regulatory compliance issues by keeping customer data within their chosen cloud environments. “Customer data runtime runs in the cloud account of their choice,” said Stewart. “Their data lives in their cloud account in the region and zone they want to manage,” allowing companies to comply with various regional data regulations.
The way forward
Northflank will use the new funding to expand cloud provider support, add regions to their multi-tenant platform and build out 24/7 business 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 standard way that engineering teams deploy and operate software,” Stewart told VentureBeat. “I still find it crazy that it is so complex to implement cloud infrastructure and applications after ten years of investing in Kubernetes and the surrounding ecosystem. It has almost become more difficult today than it was ten years ago.”
Kindred Ventures, Tapestry VC, Pebblebed and Uncorrelated Ventures also participated in the funding round, bringing Northflank’s total funding since inception to approximately $25 million.
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