Highlights:

  • The US-based company started by releasing a tool called Spin, which is an open-source WebAssembly framework designed for individual developers to engage with the platform.
  • . The company’s vision is to build the open source for starts, and once that’s established, commence working on commercial pieces.

When the cloud computing company Fermyon’s founders were working with Microsoft, they built a lot of cloud-native technologies. The founders noted that the development process, especially around Kubernetes, was complicated, and developers frequently provisioned cloud infrastructure resources for times when there were usage spikes, but resources were often unutilized.

This was a costly barrier for companies and developers that left servers unused even as companies were still paying. When the founders heard out the customers at Microsoft, they understood that they heard a blueprint for a product that the developers were looking for, and they set out last year to begin building it.

Recently the cloud computing company announced the launch of the Fermyon platform and a solid USD 6 million seed investment.

Matt Butcher, co-founder and, CEO at Fermyon, said that instead of forcing a function-based programming paradigm, the start-up decided to use WebAssembly, a much more robust programming environment initially created for the browser.

WebAssembly solved many problems for the company, including speed, security, and efficiency in terms of resources. Butcher explained, “All those things that made it good for the browser were good for the cloud. The whole isolation model that keeps WebAssembly from being able to attack the hosts through the browser was the same kind of [security] model we wanted on the cloud side.”

Additionally, a WebAssembly program could download quickly and execute instantly to solve performance questions. Instead of having multiple servers that are sitting around waiting in case of peak traffic, Fermyon can start them immediately and run them on demand.

The intention was to make the best of serverless and microservices and combine the two on the new platform that mostly eliminated Kubernetes from the management side and restored it with a simpler programming environment.

The co-founder said, “What we wanted was the serverless experience, right? Write a function, write a tiny program and pick your language, but we wanted the runtime that executed it to be far more flexible and more cost-effective, faster and easier to move around inside of a data center.”

The US-based company started by releasing a tool called Spin, which is an open-source WebAssembly framework designed for individual developers to engage with the platform. According to the company, “Spin is an instrumental piece of Fermyon that makes it easy for users to run production workloads with WebAssembly, and it achieved 1,000 GitHub stars within the first six weeks after its release.”

Currently, the company is introducing Fermyon, another open-source piece that allows teams to work together on the platform. This start-up launched towards the end of last year and started with a small group of 10 engineers on the first day. The CEO hopes to hire 15 people this year as the company grows. The company’s vision is to build the open source for starts, and once that’s established, commence working on commercial pieces.

The CEO said that earlier this year, the company had an offsite and explained its values as an organization, and the core value was diversity. He realized that having a core group of founders from similar backgrounds could lead to insulation, and they wanted to ensure everyone on board felt included and welcomed.

He said, “We want to make sure we’re including women and minorities as we hire, right? We want to make sure that we’re including people in different time zones as we communicate. We want to make sure we’re including the people who are new to the team. And so as we talked through a lot of that at our offsite, we basically explored the best practices we can use to amp up every one of these dimensions”.

It includes pairing new employees with somebody with prior experience, regardless of the business function, being aware of time zone differences, recording every meeting, and posting them in Slack, so that people track missing information. Additionally, he starts every session by checking in with people and how the employees are doing before launching into work. This is designed to make everyone feel like a part of the team.

A seed investment of USD 6 million was led by Amplify Partners and a few industry angels.