Northflank raises $22M to make Kubernetes work for your developers – ship workloads, not infrastructure

In an era where deploying software has become increasingly convoluted—with endless YAML files, Terraform scripts, and Kubernetes clusters—engineering teams are spending more time managing infrastructure than creating the products that drive business outcomes. As an industry, we've somehow shifted our focus from building products to building the factories that produce them. This makes no sense, and it's time to change that.

That's why we're excited to announce $22 million in funding, accelerating our mission to help developers create workloads, not infrastructure. But what is a workload? It's any microservice, any database, any job—any software that can run on a server. Workloads are the building blocks that power your business.

The problem: Infrastructure overload

The optimism of the early days of containers—when technologies like Docker and Kubernetes promised to revolutionize deployment—has been overshadowed by the complexities of managing them. Today, developers are entangled in building and maintaining complex CI/CD pipelines and grappling with infrastructure sprawl. Companies pour resources into infrastructure setup and maintenance, inflating costs and stretching teams thin.

Why is it acceptable to spend months or even years setting up automated environments, ensuring zonal and regional redundancy, and crafting intricate deployment processes? Why are we tolerating cumbersome release cycles and error-prone manual interventions? It's time to break free from this cycle.

Consider the world of game development. Building a game engine like Unreal Engine (UE) from scratch is an unrealistic endeavour for most developers due to the immense resources required to keep up with the latest technology. Instead of investing time and effort into engine development, game creators now mostly rely on UE to start building their games immediately. This shift allows them to focus on what truly matters: delivering engaging gaming experiences.

This analogy mirrors the pain software developers feel today when working atop incomplete or feature-scarce platforms. Too many Internal Developer Platforms (IDP) fail to produce the kind of output that justifies the months to years invested in building and managing them. We should be building on abstractions that act as a force multiplier and get IDP initiatives in a usable state in days to weeks, not the current standard of months to years.

Recognizing this parallel, we founded Northflank to eliminate these hurdles. Just as UE empowers game developers to focus on their creations without worrying about the underlying engine, Northflank enables software teams to concentrate on shipping software quickly and efficiently—without the overhead of building and maintaining their own IDPs.

Our solution: Workloads over infrastructure

Northflank is picking up where pioneers like Heroku and Pivotal Cloud Foundry left off. Heroku got the self-service developer experience right but didn’t allow for complex workloads where enterprises want them – in their cloud accounts. Cloud Foundry was the right application abstraction to simplify the complex but the underlying infrastructure was too costly and painful to implement. Northflank gives you the best of both worlds: complex workloads, great developer experience, and the right abstractions in your cloud in minutes without breaking the bank.

We're advocating for a new paradigm: make workloads, not infrastructure. Northflank provides an application-level abstraction for Kubernetes, enabling developers and DevOps teams to focus on delivering valuable applications without the overhead of managing complex infrastructure.

Customers don’t pay you to write YAML.

Our platform empowers developers to build, deploy, and scale apps, services, databases, and jobs on any cloud in a self-service way. For DevOps and platform teams, we offer a powerful abstraction over Kubernetes clusters, allowing for templated, standardized production releases with smart defaults and the configurability you need.

Abstraction over Kubernetes: Unlocking simplicity and power

Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto standard for container orchestration, offering powerful primitives for building scalable and resilient applications. Yet, its inherent complexity can be a barrier for many development teams.

Think of Kubernetes as an operating system upon which platforms can be built. Managed Kubernetes services have significantly reduced complexity and dramatically enhanced teams' ability to run single-tenant container orchestrators. This is where Kubernetes (K8s) has excelled, surpassing competitors like Mesos, Nomad, and Rancher. Managed Kubernetes could be considered the eighth wonder of the world. Every major cloud provider has standardized on providing an open, consistent API and control plane, enabling platforms like Northflank to run inside your cloud account within 30 minutes—reliably and securely.

Major cloud providers—including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)—offer managed K8s services that make it easier to get a cluster up and running, accelerating adoption. However, they haven't solved the challenge of deploying workloads onto these clusters. That's where Northflank comes in.

By simplifying Kubernetes into an accessible platform, Northflank enables teams to deploy and manage applications without getting bogged down in the intricacies of infrastructure management. We leverage Kubernetes' robust capabilities such as controllers, custom resource definitions (CRDs), daemonsets, runtime classes, and storage and network drivers. Northflank does this while providing an interface that is composable and approachable.

The Kubernetes ecosystem is thriving, with a vibrant community and powerful open-source tools like Istio and Cilium adding immense value on top of Kubernetes. By building on this foundation, Northflank allows you to tap into this ecosystem without the steep learning curve. We are proud to be a member of the Linux Foundation and support many tools in the CNCF Landscape.

Why Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) matters

Enterprises require flexibility and control over their cloud environments. That's why Northflank supports Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), enabling you to deploy workloads on your own cloud infrastructure—whether it's AWS, GCP, Azure, or even on-premises. This approach offers several key benefits:

• Ownership and control: Running within your own Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) gives you greater control over your data and infrastructure, addressing concerns around security, compliance, and regulation.
• Solving the graduation problem: Traditional platforms often falter with a "graduation problem," where scaling beyond a certain point becomes challenging. By pairing a powerful Kubernetes abstraction with the ability to run inside your own cloud account, Northflank solves this issue.
• Reshoring workloads: As more microservices and third-party tools are dispersed across various locations, BYOC allows you to bring these workloads back into your VPC, consolidating your infrastructure.
• Cost efficiency: Companies can leverage their existing cloud commitments and credits to save money and maximise efficiency.
• Access to latest hardware and regions: BYOC allows you to take advantage of the latest hardware offerings and regional availability from major cloud providers, ensuring optimal performance and proximity to your customers.
• Hybrid cloud flexibility: BYOC enables a hybrid cloud approach, allowing you to run workloads across multiple cloud providers or on-premises environments. This flexibility not only counters vendor lock-in but also provides an "insurance policy" for your most critical workloads. For most engineering teams, a consistent release process with workload portability is a pipe dream. And you want disaster recovery? Good luck. Northflank unlocks the multi-cloud end state (don’t worry, I cringe at that phrase too).

The importance of self-service

Developers are constantly bogged down by bureaucratic hurdles that prevent them from spinning up workloads and databases instantly. It makes no sense that deploying something as essential as PostgreSQL requires submitting a Jira ticket and then waiting around for weeks. You should be able to deploy it in seconds, right alongside your new backend workload in a preview environment. Waiting on other teams that are already swamped not only grinds development to a halt but also breeds unnecessary frustration. This isn't just a minor inconvenience—it's a glaring inefficiency that's crippling your engineering team’s productivity.

Not every team member is a platform or DevOps engineer, nor should they need to be. Developers want to focus on building applications, not getting tangled up in complex YAML configurations or wrestling with Helm charts. Northflank cuts through the nonsense by providing a self-service Platform as a Service (PaaS) that supercharges the developer experience across an expansive range of software and deployment configurations. This empowers organizations to adopt a robust platform from the get-go, scale seamlessly with it, and effortlessly transition to Northflank's Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) or on-premises solutions when the time is right. Choose your own adventure: Northflank’s PaaS or BYOC; start small and graduate later.

But, why now?

Several industry trends amplify the need for solutions like Northflank:

• Emphasis on developer experience: Developers and organisations increasingly prioritise tools that enhance productivity and satisfaction through self-service.
• Rising costs: Building software and maintaining cloud infrastructure have become more expensive, driving the need for more efficient solutions.
• Tooling sprawl: The proliferation of tools has added complexity to software development, making unified platforms more appealing.
• Desire for optionality: Companies want to avoid vendor lock-in and seek flexibility to operate across multiple cloud providers.
• Hybrid cloud adoption: Enterprises are looking to leverage existing on-premises investments while adopting cloud-like experiences, often as a strategy for cost management and risk mitigation.

The tailwinds are not going away, and they’ll only get worse. So, let’s make workloads, not infrastructure.

Our journey and rapid growth

Today marks a significant milestone for Northflank—we've secured $22 million in Series A and Seed funding, led by Bain Capital Ventures and Vertex Ventures US, with participation from Kindred Ventures, Pebblebed, and Uncorrelated Ventures. This investment fuels our mission to revolutionize software deployment, enabling developers to focus on delivering valuable applications rather than wrestling with complex infrastructure.

Since our founding in early 2019, Northflank has been on a mission to streamline developer workflows. In 2020, I shared our journey in the announcement titled "Northflank Enters the Fray," marking our bold entry into the developer tools landscape. Since then, Northflank has grown to empower tens of thousands of developers to deploy production workloads across more than six cloud providers, deploying over a million containers monthly. We expect to surpass 10 billion public egress requests processed monthly by the end of the year.

We are grateful to collaborate with amazing customers like Sentry, Writer, Northfield, Chai Discovery, Clock, and thousands more, who have been instrumental in shaping the platform into what it is today.

"Northflank is way easier than glueing a bunch of tools together to spin up apps and databases. It's the ideal platform to deploy containers in our cloud account, avoiding the brain damage of big cloud and Kubernetes. It's more powerful and flexible than traditional PaaS – all within our VPC. Northflank has become a go-to way to deploy workloads at Sentry."

— David Cramer, Co-Founder and CPO @ Sentry

This sustained increase in usage and revenue growth, along with a platform that solves the graduation problem for enterprise and self-service users, has enabled us to raise a successful Series A. We're now rapidly scaling our Product, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and Go-To-Market (GTM) teams to meet the growing demand and ensure that our platform remains robust, secure, and user-friendly (if this excites you, check out our careers here).

What's next: Our product roadmap

We are committed to continuous improvement and innovation. In the coming months, we plan to:

• Enhance our managed offerings:
  • Add more global regions.
  • Support newer hardware, including ARM.
  • Provide standard DDoS protection.
  • Achieve faster build times with local caching.
• Expand our platform and enterprise capabilities:
  • Extend BYOC support to additional cloud providers.
  • Introduce Bring Your Own Kubernetes (BYOK).
  • Offer a self-deployable control plane for greater autonomy.
  • Enhance project and cluster-level observability and awareness.

This brief snapshot of our team's upcoming efforts showcases how we ensure Northflank grows alongside our expanding customer base, positioning it to be your production workload platform well beyond your IPO.

Join us in shaping the future

Infrastructure should exist to serve us—the developers, the innovators—not the other way around. Too much time is spent managing the complexities of infrastructure when the real focus should be on the workloads that deliver value to users and drive revenue.

If you've ever felt the frustration of:

• Waiting too long for environment setups
• Dealing with error-prone release processes
• Lacking access to critical logs and metrics
• Navigating infrastructure sprawl
• Being confined by rigid deployment stacks
• Overloading your DevOps team
• Re-platforming without resolving core issues
• Struggling to harness Kubernetes effectively
• Using outdated cloud console UIs

...then Northflank is built for you.

Let's build the future together

We're thrilled about the road ahead and invite you to join us in making workloads—not infrastructure—the priority again. Let's empower teams to focus on innovation and delivering exceptional products to users.

If this vision resonates with you, we'd love to chat. Together, we can redefine what's possible and shape the future of software development.

— Will Stewart, CEO and Co-Founder and Frederik Brix CTO and Co-Founder Northflank