Northflank: Speed, Functionality, Or Seamless Orchestration…Pick 3?
First off, we’re absolutely thrilled at Kindred Ventures to have led the seed round for Northflank, a modern single-solution approach to DevOps. We’re happy also to be investing alongside our friends, Harry, Fred, and Pia at Stride VC and a stellar band of founder/CTO angels including Alexis Le-Quoc (CTO/Founder of DataDog), Laurent Perrin (CTO/Founder of Frontapp) and Eric Nadalin (CTO/Founder of Nexmo), and Louis Beryl (Founder of Earnest).
The Gaming Origins of Northflank
Building a product for yourself (and others like you), and to solve your own experienced pain, is one of the most clear and crisp reasons to start a company. When we first met Will and Fred from Northflank, they were serious gaming competitors and had developed a series of gaming software products. They spoke colorfully about their frustrations in integrating and managing various DevOps tools to build and deploy these gaming apps. They saw a big gap in the market for a lightweight and inexpensive tool set that didn’t require many time-consuming integrations/setup and a dedicated engineer. They set out to build a cloud-hosted DevOps platform that would provide a single solution that would be lighting fast and functional with your full technology stack. I mean, how else would game developers design a DevOps tool?
This picture is a really big idea, a holy grail type of product vision for post-commit DevOps. Their mission is to help developers stay focused on shipping great products, while Northflank seamlessly combines integration, delivery, and deployment for them, all accessible via Northflank’s dashboard UIs and APIs. Could it truly be lightning fast, functionally complete, and offer seamless orchestration — maybe too broad in scope and objective? But, as in the case of many talented founders, they possessed a healthy dose of disrespect for the many reasons to not do so, along with a clear and thoughtful vision of what they wanted to build.
The Northflank Developer Beta
Today, Northflank is shipping their beta and inviting developers to join via waitlist. If you are a startup or even a smaller team within a larger org, this might be perfect for you: https://northflank.com/beta
Remote and Distributed, by Nature
While remote and distributed teamwork is still a challenge for most companies, but it does work far better when the team starts this way, and is focused on software development. Northflank is a wonderful case in point: Will and Fred hadn’t even met in-person before starting Northflank, their engineering team hails from 5 different countries, and they’re focused on recruiting the best technical talent wherever they may happen to live. If you’d like to join this modern team, apply here: https://careers.northflank.com/jobs
Note About Investing From Afar: Zoom With A Little Help From Our Friends
Over the course of six months (before CoVid), we had the pleasure to work with the brilliant Northflank founders over many frequent Zoom chats and email in 8 hour time zone differences, getting to know how they think about mesos vs kubernetes, continuous delivery, and selling to developers versus organizations. In the process of this discussion, Will and Fred connected with several of our experienced technical founders in the Kindred portfolio who manage small early teams — the prime customer for Northflank. These early conversations helped formatively shape the company’s thinking in their own technology stack and feature roadmap. Many thanks to Nayan from Heartbeat Health, Julian from Bitski, and Mahyar from OpenPhone!
As Will and Fred like to say, it’s time to build and deploy!
Steve & Kanyi
