Highlights:

  • With USD 25 million in funding raised by investors in July, the total fund of Fly.io went over USD 115 million.
  • The company also plans to sell graphics processing units to provide hardware-accelerated coverage for artificial intelligence workloads.

Fly.io, a provider of cloud infrastructure that hosts app servers and databases close to end users, disclosed receiving USD 70 million in fresh funding to offer new services and widen its footprint worldwide.

EQT Ventures initiated the Series C funding round with the inclusion of Dell Technologies Capital as well as current investors – Intel Capital Corp and Andreessen Horowitz. With USD 25 million in funding raised by investors in July, the total fund of Fly.io went over USD 115 million.

Fly.io’s value proposition is to make it simple and convenient for developers to launch databases and applications on cloud infrastructure as close to their users as possible. This is significant as running on the edge considerably lowers latency, which is critical for many applications.

The issue is that while most application developers desire to operate close to their users, not all developers have the time or inclination to learn how to use the tools required to create and operate on unique cloud instances.

The problem, according to Kurt Mackey, Co-founder and CEO of Fly.io, was that developers with crucial requirements might invest time to make systems work, while the creators of restaurant apps or bookstores would likely give up. He referred to this as the “two-hour problem.”

“The game server team will bang on edge deployment until it’s solved. The bookstore team will try for about two hours, not find a clear path forward, and then give up and move on to other things. We think everybody understands that it’d be better to run close to users rather than in the internet’s least worst data center,” added Mackey.

Fly.io initially served 19 locations before growing to over 33. With the additional capital, Mackey stated that the business plans to keep growing to add more data centers, enabling developers to place their applications as close to customers as is practical. The company also plans to sell graphics processing units to provide hardware-accelerated coverage for artificial intelligence workloads.

With this funding, Mackey continued, the company has even bigger plans for expanding developer capabilities, including real-time functionality and user presence. Along with possibilities for clustered databases, the platform promises to incorporate security features like encryption and secret storage.

Mackey mentioned, “So our bet is simple: With the right platform and toolchain, people building bookstores, sandwich rating apps, music recommenders, mailing list managers for churches, and every other kind of app will build apps that run fast globally.”