Why We Invested in Spacelift
Modern software applications need to be shipped frequently and in a reliable way. Complex cloud infrastructures and the products that rely on them are developed by many teams simultaneously. Such complexity requires extensive work around ensuring quality and compliance of the deployed code. Spacelift, the newest addition to Inovo’s family, solves the challenge by automating many parts of this so-far manual process and enables companies to ship faster, cheaper, and better. Here’s why we co-led a $1.6m Pre-Seed round in the company co-founded by a fantastic duo of Marcin Wyszynski and Pawel Hytry.
When you hire a team of developers, you don’t want them to focus on the paperwork — you want them to develop the next great product. The competitive market demands excellent quality, fast development, and reliability. The dawn of cloud infrastructures made it possible to ship fast and created a challenge of doing it well.
Spacelift, a continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) platform for infrastructure, answers this challenge. It enables companies to build, package, and test applications in an automated, more reliable way. This moves focus from labor-intensive tasks and solving tickets to what really matters. Using Spacelift, developers can continue to ship at a faster pace and trust the system to ensure compliance.
It comes as no surprise that the DevOps market is exploding. It is growing 19% year-to-year and is projected to reach $15bn by 2026. Leading companies such as Revolut, Netflix, and Waze are using CI/CD as part of their everyday development practices. Spacelift brings much-needed automation to the market. The public cloud industry, which is worth $280bn today and growing by a fifth every twelve months, is expected to use automation tools such as Spacelift shortly, taking the market potential to the next level.
All experts we’ve interviewed agree that soon all software companies using cloud infrastructure will need a solution to automate part of its DevOps. One of our interviewees pointed out that infrastructure as code will experience massive growth within the next 3–5 years as existing solutions are often not sustainable.
Spacelift’s beta tests decreased time spent on infrastructure problem-solving and enabled more productive cooperation within the DevOps teams. All companies that tested an early implementation want to buy the product.
Marcin Wyszynski, Spacelift’s co-founder, and CEO experienced the problem first-hand while working at top tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and Deliveroo. He quickly realized that growing cloud infrastructures rely too much on human control and require automation tools. Marcin is a problem-solver and takes critical thinking to the next level. One of his previous colleagues told us that he’s a “10x developer with a great focus on creating functional products”, while the other one pointed to a “deep understanding of problems he’s solving.”
When we first met, Marcin was a solo founder with excellent technical skills, and the only element missing at Spacelift was a partner to execute operations. We connected him to Pawel Hytry, who became a Co-founder and brought a strong business development experience.
We had a chance to observe Pawel’s development over the years and been impressed with the results. Most recently, he has successfully built and later exited FitPass, an employee engagement company. Throughout our conversations, we recognized that both this and his previous experience (McKinsey, Foodpanda) gave him a clear-headed vision of building a fast-growing startup.
The round was closed in record-breaking time. It took us only a week to bring Hoxton Ventures as a co-lead and gather an impressive list of angel investors, including Ilkka Paananen (Supercell), Vijay Pandurangan (Mitro), Michael Stoppelman (Yelp).
Spacelift has it all to become the next moonshot. Pawel, Marcin, we’re happy to partner up with you!
Inovo Venture Partners backs early-stage, post-traction startups that can grow 100x. We partner up with ambitious founders like Stefan from Booksy, Maja from Zowie, or Piotr from Infermedica. We invest between €0.5–2M in startups from Poland and the region.
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