Unikraft Launches With $6M to Drive Dramatic New Efficiencies in Scale and Cost for Cloud Computing in the AI Era

Unikraft, the first truly millisecond-native, highly scalable cloud platform, has publicly launched and announced Unikraft Cloud, an infrastructure platform purpose-built to support the complexity of AI-driven cloud workloads. The company also raised a $6 million seed round led by Heavybit, with participation from Vercel Ventures, Mango Capital, Firestreak, Fly VC, First Momentum Ventures, and a group of strategic angels. The funding marks Vercel Ventures’ first startup investment.

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Cloud economies of scale for the AI era

As AI-generated code, agents, and applications multiply, traditional cloud platforms are struggling to keep up. Always-on, resource-heavy infrastructure has become an economic bottleneck, and likely to worsen as Gartner forecasts that 50% of all cloud resources will be devoted to AI workloads in the coming years.

Unikraft was built from the ground up to address the inherent instability and significant cost of such workloads by unlocking the potential of a little-used technology called unikernels: lightweight, specialized operating system images that combine only the minimal OS components required to run a single application. By re-engineering the low-level components of cloud infrastructure to leverage the efficiency, speed, and inherently secure isolation of unikernels for production environments, Unikraft could achieve a 10-100x reduction in the cost and footprint of cloud workloads.

Developed in 2017 at NEC Laboratories Europe by computer science researchers Felipe Huici, Simon Keunzer, and Alexander Jung, the Unikraft OS project secured backing from The Linux Foundation in 2019 and formed as a corporate entity in 2022. The scientific paper about Unikraft’s technology received the prestigious EuroSys Best Paper Award in 2021.

“Legacy cloud infrastructure was never designed for the scale and unpredictability of AI workloads,” said Felipe Huici, Unikraft’s co-founder and CEO. “We’ve spent the better part of a decade rethinking cloud from first principles to deliver significant speed, scalability, and security gains at a fraction of the cost. It’s the foundation companies need to keep pace with the next wave of AI applications.”

The culmination of Unikraft’s eight years of research and development are dramatic economies of scale and cost reduction, as well as strong security advantages, achieved by the Unikraft Cloud platform:

• Start workloads in milliseconds with 10–50ms cold starts, even for heavyweight apps.
• Scale up or down instantly with millisecond autoscaling and true scale-to-zero.
• Run 10,000–100,000+ strongly isolated virtual machines per server, enabling millions of workloads per rack.
• Reduce compute costs by an order of magnitude, with benchmarks showing twice the requests per second at half the price of traditional VM deployments.
• Maintain strong hardware-level isolation, avoiding the security trade-offs of containers.
• Seamless integration with existing developer workflows through Dockerfiles, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Grafana.

Proven results in enterprise deployments

Unikraft has partnered with numerous companies to run their production workloads, with transformational results. Some have been able to launch new business lines that were previously the realm of imagination, while others have revamped commercial strategies or achieved exponentially better unit economics to outpace competition.

“With Unikraft, we can run over 100,000 strongly isolated PostgreSQL instances on a single machine,” said Soren Bramer Schmidt, founder and CEO of Prisma. “That density is unheard of in traditional architectures and fundamentally changes the economics of the game — we’re stepping into a new infrastructure paradigm.”

“With Unikraft, we successfully scaled our enterprise web agent infrastructure to handle increased demand while maintaining the reliability and performance standards our enterprise customers expect,” said Shuhao Zhang, co-founder and CPO of enterprise web agent platform TinyFish. “Working with the Unikraft team has been exceptional – their expertise and responsiveness made our deployment smooth and successful.”

“Choosing Unikraft to power our platform was one the best decisions we’ve made,” said Alex Greaves, co-founder of cross-platform mobile app platform Flutterflow. “It’s a powerful and reliable service that supercharges our users’ experience.”

Heavybit will join Unikraft’s board with this funding round, with Fly VC adding a board observer seat.

“AI is changing the speed and scale at which companies build software. Cloud infrastructure hasn’t kept pace,” said Tom Drummond, founder and managing director at Heavybit. “Unikraft dramatically increases the scalability and reduces the cost of infrastructure for agents and AI workloads. We are thrilled to be partnering with talented technical founders like Felipe, Alexander, and Simon to help companies unlock their next stage of product and business growth.”

“When code is generated by AI and deployed automatically, the infrastructure behind it must be radically faster and lighter,” said Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel. “That’s why Vercel Ventures invested in Unikraft: its cloud infrastructure technology provides exponentially higher efficiency and scalability, along with the strong isolation this new frontier demands.”

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