Investing in Fly.io
We’re very excited to announce that we’re leading the series B for Fly.io. Fly is one of the fastest-growing core infrastructure companies we have ever seen. And it’s worth understanding why.
Web applications are becoming more and more real-time, and users expect them to be snappy! This means multi-region is critical so that apps can run as close to users as possible. Traditionally, multi-region in the cloud has been both difficult and expensive. And the developer experience has been horrendous. And that’s exactly what Fly addresses and why it has become so popular, so fast.
So what exactly is Fly.io? It’s an infrastructure provider that has many dozens of server clusters around the world with out-of-the-box multi-region support. And a seamless developer experience so that deploying a global workload really is an extension of local development. Fly supports many of the most popular frameworks to build modern cloud apps, including Phoenix, Remix, Node, and Next.js (and dozens more). And it includes a number of useful distributed services, such as multi-region Postgres.
The industry has been talking about a service like Fly.io for ages. But until Fly, it just hasn’t produced the right experience for developers. Traditional CDNs don’t have mature compute offerings, as their roots are largely in caching. And the traditional cloud service providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) are built around tighter centralization, and thus multi-region is complicated and very expensive! CloudFlare Workers is an important step in the right direction. But it is an opinionated offering and doesn’t offer a general compute model for any workload.
Fly, on the other hand, will run anything that runs in a docker container. And it’s built to make multi-region trivial.
The Fly founding team members are all repeat entrepreneurs with deep backgrounds in infrastructure; CEO Kurt Mackey previously founded Compose, which sold to IBM, and prior to that, helped build Ars Technica. And indeed, building a solution like Fly requires an incredibly special team. One that not only knows how to provide an elegant and magical developer experience. But also knows how to build a global platform, from networking to servers to software.The founders at Fly have done just that.
Fly is a key step in the long march for applications to run closer to the user, providing native-like performance while performing sophisticated, dynamic computation. We’re very excited to be a partner as Fly changes cloud native apps by providing the industry’s leading-edge compute platform.
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