Back-end development platform Platformatic raises $3.5M

Platformatic, a new back-end development platform, wants to make it easier for enterprises to modernize their infrastructure by giving them the tools to build and deploy microservices-based architectures with the simplicity of a monolith. The company, which was founded by Node.js veterans Luca Maraschi (CEO) and Matteo Collina (CTO), also today announced a $3.5 million seed funding round led by Decibel, with Panache Ventures and a number of angel investors (including GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner) also participating.

Unsurprisingly, given the co-founders’ background, Platformatic uses Node.js and, maybe even more importantly, the popular Fastify web framework created by Collina, at its core. Fastify is already in use at large enterprises like Capital One, Walmart and American Express and Platformatic essentially takes Fastify and extends it with enterprise capabilities, managed services and a dedicated support team. That’s pretty much the modern playbook for monetizing popular open source projects.

It’s Fastify’s extensibility and plug-in architecture that enables the team to build this new platform, the company explains.

“In today’s digital world, businesses of all shapes and sizes are undergoing digital transformation initiatives in order to keep at pace with the growing need to deliver robust, reliable and scalable software,” write the founders. “However, with application architectures moving from monolithic to distributed, building and operating these distributed backends is becoming increasingly complex. While frontend application development has benefitted from modern frameworks and platforms, backend development has lagged far behind due to its complex and rigid nature.”

The promise of Platformatic is that it abstracts away all of the routine work of setting up the back-end infrastructure, database integrations, authentication, security settings, API gateways, observability and more, and allows developers to focus on writing their code, no matter where it will later run.

“Platform engineering teams keep reinventing the wheel with components that are virtually identical across companies,” said Decibel partner Sudip Chakrabarti. “It holds developers back from building products that make an impact. Platformatic offers the best of all worlds: a great developer experience and peace of mind for enterprises with lower dependency risks and deployment costs.”

The platform includes the Platformatic Runtime and Runtime API for consolidating an enterprise’s Node.js applications and microservices into a single unit; Platformatic Taxonomy for creating a visual map of these microservices and how they are connected; Platformatic Composition for composing these microservices into one ecosystem with a single API; and Platformatic Cloud, the company’s cloud environment for deploying these Node.js applications.

“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,” said Maraschi. “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.”