Platformatic raises $3.5M for its backend development platform

Platformatic — a fast backend development platform to help build API-driven applications — has raised USD $3.5 million to launch a suite of new enterprise-grade solutions. The company’s investors include local firm Panache Ventures, as well as several angels like GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner, Socket founder and CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh, and major Node.js contributor James Snell.

The less-than-one-year-old startup was founded by CEO Luca Maraschi — a Vancouver-based tech executive who has previously held roles at MobileLive, CTO.ai, and Telus — and CTO Matteo Collina, known for creating Fastify. The company has offices in both Vancouver and San Francisco.

Platformatic will use its funding to extend its platform, grow its team, and continue establishing Fastify — one of the most popular web frameworks in the Node.js ecosystem with users such as Capital One, Walmart, and American Express — as the go-to web framework for development.

What does it do? 

Building, extending, and operating modern backend platform infrastructure requires significant investments of time and resources across enterprise teams, which takes developers away from building products for customers. Platformatic extends an application’s existing backend so larger companies can enjoy the perks of distributed systems with a turn-key deployment.

More technically, the company’s core product is an instant backend architecture with high-end components for Node.js applications, including native database integration, integration with existing CI/CD tools, application templates, feature flagging, IDE integrations, and observability.

Why should you care?

While a new generation of tools that simplify front-event development like React, Next.js, and Vercel are already in regular use by enterprises, Platformatic says little has been done to make back-end development easier, “because it’s a more rigid environment to change.” Its product marks a step forward in developing that architecture.

Perhaps most significantly for the Vancouver tech community, Platformatic’s raise demonstrates that funding is still available to companies with strong ideas and business fundamentals — even those with less than one year of experience on their resume.

Who said what?

“Our vision with Platformatic is to offer a great developer experience that completely abstracts away all the complexity of building and operating a backend platform so that developers need not reinvent the wheel ever again,” said the founders in a statement. “We plan to build Platformatic such that it just works out-of-the-box and yet provides all the reliability, security and scalability that developers and enterprises so desperately need. Additionally, while the out-of-the-box Platformatic experience provides an ‘opinionated’ view of how distributed backends should be, it allows for customizations to address bespoke enterprise needs. Our goal is to be opinionated without being prescriptive, and the rich plug-in ecosystem around Fastify provides the best platform to accomplish that vision.”