Platformatic Raises $3.5 Million to Help Developers and Enterprises Evolve Microservices Without a Costly Rearchitecture of Legacy Backend

Core Node.js maintainer for open source project Fastify, used by Capital One and Walmart, launches a new out-of-the-box API platform to help companies modernize infrastructure

Platformatic, the fast backend development platform for developers and enterprises to build modern API-driven applications, has raised $3.5 million and launched a suite of new enterprise-grade solutions. The company will use the funding to extend the platform, grow the team, and continue establishing Fastify as the go-to open-source web framework for Node.js development.

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“It holds developers back from building products that make an impact. Platformatic offers the best of all worlds: a great developer experience and peace of mind for enterprises with lower dependency risks and deployment costs.”

Decibel led the round, with participation from Panache Ventures and several angel investors including GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner, Socket founder and CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh, major Node.js contributor James Snell, Tier.run founder Jevon MacDonald, notable Silicon Valley investor Walter Kortschak, and serial entrepreneur and investor Omri Barzilay.

Platformatic’s co-founders, CTO Matteo Collina and CEO Luca Maraschi, are longstanding leaders in the Node.js community with extensive experience in enterprise deployments. Collina is a creator of Fastify, one of the most popular web frameworks in the Node.js ecosystem with over 4 million downloads per month and 3x year-on-year growth, whose users include Capital One, Walmart, and American Express among hundreds of other enterprises. Platformatic extends the capabilities of Fastify with enterprise-grade solutions, managed services and dedicated support.

Avoiding the dreaded rearchitecture

The repetitive and onerous task of building, extending and operating modern backend platform infrastructure at scale for microservices-based architectures requires significant investments of resources and efforts across enterprise teams, taking developers away from the work needed to build the applications that customers love. The platform engineering teams that oversee the web of APIs underpinning modern distributed software are overwhelmed by expectations to build more and faster, without breaking the underlying foundation or being forced to rearchitect applications.

Platformatic solves this problem by seamlessly extending an application’s existing backend so enterprises can leverage the perks of distributed systems with the deployment simplicity of a monolith. The company’s core product is an instant backend architecture with best-of-breed components for Node.js applications including native database integration, integration with existing CI/CD tools, application templates, feature flagging, IDE integrations, and observability.

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Today, Platformatic launches a suite of new enterprise-grade products that can be self-hosted on-prem, in a private cloud, or on Platformatic’s managed cloud service:

• Platformatic Runtime: Maintain the benefits of microservices but deploy them as a monolithic app for increased resiliency. The Runtime API consolidates all of an organization’s Node.js applications and microservices into a single unit for deployment, reducing deployment-related risks and bolstering standardization.
• Platformatic Taxonomy: Create a comprehensive map of microservices connections and dependencies to assess application architecture and deployment risks.
• Platformatic Composition: Automatically compose microservices into one ecosystem with a single public API, guaranteeing low-latency communication.
• Platformatic Cloud: A cloud environment for deploying Node.js applications with pull request previews, rapid deploys and observability built in.

“Platformatic is born of the combination of the highest quality, community-driven open source with practical enterprise problem solving that only comes from deep experience,” says James Snell, a Node.js Technical Steering Committee member and Cloudflare Systems Engineer who invested in Platformatic as an angel.

Improving developer experience for the backend

A new generation of tools have emerged to make frontend development more repeatable, like React, Next.js and Vercel. But little has been done for the backend because it’s a more rigid environment to change.

“When I developed Fastify, I wanted to create a performance-centric web framework to improve developer experience built on the same Open Source community principles as Node.js,” says co-founder and CTO Collina. “Platformatic is the natural evolution of Fastify, designed to fit into a developer team’s existing or desired infrastructure with a flexible, configurable approach.”

“A modern enterprise needs to keep at pace with user demands without over-burdening platform engineering teams. Platformatic provides individual developers of all skill levels with an out-of-the box, modular platform engineering solution to cut infrastructure development work by up to 90%, while also providing enterprises with a resilient microservices architecture to support their applications,” says Maraschi, co-founder and CEO.

Decibel Partner Sudip Chakrabarti sees the abstraction of backend development as a critical step to unlocking developer creativity and removing operational barriers. “Platform engineering teams keep reinventing the wheel with components that are virtually identical across companies,” said Chakrabarti. “It holds developers back from building products that make an impact. Platformatic offers the best of all worlds: a great developer experience and peace of mind for enterprises with lower dependency risks and deployment costs.”

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