In a significant stride forward, Ankra, the Swedish cloud infrastructure automation platform, has secured a substantial €1.1 million in pre-seed funding. The investment round was spearheaded by London-based VC SuperSeed, renowned for its recent investments in Ai Build and Thingtrax, and accompanied by several angel investors who share the vision.
This new capital infusion will play a pivotal role in advancing Ankra's platform development to meet the demands of a growing client waitlist. Additionally, it will be deployed to strengthen the company's foothold in the UK market, signaling its intention to revolutionize the cloud infrastructure landscape.
Ankra emerged from the collaboration of co-founders Mark Shine, Mattias Karlsson Åsell, and Benjamin Klingsbo, who brought their rich experience from companies like Ericsson and Google. Together, they recognized a common challenge faced by developers in an era of increasingly complex cloud infrastructures and rapid corporate expansion.
Developers, who are already in high demand, were spending excessive hours grappling with system maintenance. This included mitigating system crashes, averting data losses, and addressing service slowdowns – all of which diverted their focus from core coding and application development.
Ankra's innovative platform is engineered to change the way software development teams interact with and manage their cloud infrastructure. It simplifies resource provisioning, allowing developers to automatically set up the necessary resources when and where they are needed. This streamlined approach aims to help developers save crucial time and resources.
Ankra's comprehensive solution supports end-to-end setup and maintenance of Kubernetes-based infrastructures. It empowers developers to oversee the entire lifecycle of their applications through a single, unified dashboard.
The Ankra product is scheduled to make its debut among a select group of customers, including startups and high-tier banks in the UK in 2024.
Mattias Karlsson Åsell, CEO of Ankra, explained the significance of this innovation, saying, "Today, 30% of a fintech developer’s time gets bogged down in configuring and maintaining cloud infrastructure. This stalls companies and delays their applications from hitting the market. Ankra simplifies this, streamlining operations with a self-service approach that allows developers to set up production-ready Kubernetes clusters in just minutes. Leveraging automation, we’ve allowed developers to experience a 30% performance boost in productivity. Ultimately, we want to relieve them from the burden of infrastructure maintenance, and refocus them on what they do best: software innovation."
Mads Jensen, Managing Partner at SuperSeed, echoed this sentiment, emphasizing the potential benefits Ankra offers to banks and fintech companies, "The team at Ankra are focused on delivering what matters for customers that are deploying complex infrastructure – real productivity enhancement and cost savings. For banks and fintechs, Ankra offers excellent ROI. We look forward to supporting the founders in launching into the UK market and getting commercial traction with London’s world-leading fintech companies."
