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Ankra grabs €1.1 million from Superseed Ventures
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The startup's automation platform will offer its proprietary CI/CD system
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The CTO said the startup is working towards a multi-cloud future
Swedish cloud infrastructure automation startup Ankra has just secured €1.1 million ($1.164 million) in pre-seed funding as the company moves to sell its software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to customers to customers early next year.
Silverlinings talked to Mark Shine, the startup’s CTO, about the platform, automation, its proprietary continuous integration and continuous delivery/continuous deployment (CI/CD) system and speedily deploying Kubernetes clusters.
Shine told us that Ankra is already onboarding users to its pre-commercial platform. “We are working towards a production release of our SaaS solution by January,” he said. “Today we have rolled out pilot access to multiple organizations, taking feedback and developing our solution towards production right now.”
“Ankra is an all-in-one development platform that handles everything from provisioning and managing developer environments to seamlessly integrating them into the development workflow starting from code commits,” Shine explained.
We asked the CTO about the startup’s exclusive closed-source CI/CD software, which is part of the platform. “Unlike other CI/CD systems, Ankra is involved throughout the entire development process, from code commits to production deployment. This extensive involvement provides us with a wealth of data, enabling us to accurately predict developers' intentions and code behavior,” the CTO said.
He said the startup’s approach to delivering this capability to developers is through a single configuration that covers the entire development lifecycle. The company caters to both simple and complex use cases, offering users the flexibility to easily plug and play or make adjustments to their infrastructure-as-code (IaC) as their needs evolve, Shine said.
“At Ankra, we prioritize organizational efficiency. To achieve this, we've implemented industry-standard profiles for all resources, making adoption straightforward and eliminating the need for extensive expertise in the toolset,” he explained.
Ankra said that it can deliver ready-made Kubernetes clusters in minutes rather than the days it used to take. “We currently deliver pre-made Kubernetes clusters in just nine minutes, with plans to further optimize this process, Shine explains. “Our approach revolves around the belief in the value of infrastructure agnosticism, with standardized Kubernetes clusters providing enhanced possibilities and stability.”
“We foresee the next stage of evolution in this industry to be hybrid infrastructure, which can offer even more capabilities and cost efficiency,” Shine said. “Ankra addresses this challenge by providing a unified solution that delivers standardized clusters compatible across multiple cloud providers.”
Shine said this about the pre-seed funding from SuperSeed: “Ankra is thrilled to have industry experts like Mads, Dan and the SuperSeed team, along with follow-on investors, supporting our journey into the fintech industry. We plan to expand our team to introduce cutting-edge technology that enhances development workflows and enables us to gather feedback more efficiently.” the CTO concluded.
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