Ankra, a cloud infrastructure automation platform, announced the close of €1.1 million pre-seed funding round led by UK B2B investor SuperSeed, alongside industry-leading angel investors.
Ankra automates cloud infrastructure setup and maintenance in a compliant manner, allowing companies and products to go live in days rather than enduring month-long setups. The fresh capital will be invested in further development of Ankra’s platform to cater to a waitlist of clients and to the company’s growing operations in the UK market.
With experience working on Ericsson’s 5G projects, Saab’s military-grade infrastructure, Sweden’s FX banking infrastructure, and business scaling at Google, co-founders Mark Shine, Mattias Karlsson Åsell, and Benjamin Klingsbo identified a growing issue: developers needing to spend hours maintaining systems as the complexity of cloud infrastructure increases and companies expand faster. Having to battle system crashes, data losses and service slowdowns diverts attention from core programming and app development – which drains resources, in a developer job market where demand is already more than ten times higher than supply. Ankra identified this issue as being particularly problematic in high-compliance industries such as fintech and banking because of more demanding timeframes and less leeway for bugs and progressive product iteration.
In response, Ankra’s platform transforms the way software development teams manage and maintain their cloud infrastructure: it simplifies resource provisioning and allows developers to automatically set up the resources they need, when and where they need them – allowing them to save hundreds of hours.
“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,” commented Mattias Karlsson Åsell, CEO of Ankra.
“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,” said Mads Jensen, Managing Partner at SuperSeed.
Founded in 2021, Ankra stands out in the market as the only product supporting end-to-end setup and maintenance of a kubernetes-based infrastructure and allowing developers to manage the entire lifecycle of their application through one single pane of glass. Ankra’s product will be launched to a selected list of customers, including startups and UK high-tier banks, in 2024.
