Northflank cofounders Will Stewart and Fred met online through a multiplayer game, then pitched European accelerators without disclosing they had never met in person.
Northflank did not launch for over two years because Will Stewart believes a platform for critical workloads needs a robust minimum feature set before going live.
Will Stewart says Northflank averages five to ten customer opinions per request and has not deprecated a single feature since 2019, managing migrations behind the scenes.
Two gamers who never met built a Kubernetes platform
Northflank is a developer platform that began as two gamers automating game servers, and it is built on the bet that critical workloads need a trustworthy, self-service layer over Kubernetes in the customer's own cloud. Will Stewart says that bet shaped a slow launch, careful feature choices and no deprecations. He sees AI changing how software is written but not yet how it is deployed.
Takeaways
Northflank grew from two gamers running game servers. Will Stewart and cofounder Fred met online through a multiplayer game and had spent at most about 120 days together in person before 2019. Hand-deploying game servers on bare metal led them to automate it, then to build a platform.
Public cloud and Heroku did not fit their needs. Public cloud was not yet good enough for game servers, so they used OVH and Hetzner bare metal and Mesos. They then needed databases, microservices and CI/CD, and Heroku did not meet that, so they built something more accessible.
Northflank sits between Cloud Foundry and Heroku. It deploys critical workloads into the customer's own cloud account on Kubernetes, across AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and CoreWeave, with Heroku's self-service experience. A platform-as-a-service option also exists. The aim is to fix Kubernetes for developers.
Delaying launch built trust with picky developers. Northflank moved from Mesos to Kubernetes and did not launch for over two years. Will says critical workloads need a robust minimum feature set and developers take long to trust a tool. His regret is not publishing content sooner.
A horizontal platform demands cautious feature decisions. Northflank weighs five to ten customer opinions before building, since one feature can break another. Every feature must work in the UI, API, CLI and GitOps. It has deprecated nothing since 2019 and handles migrations behind the scenes.
Small team ships fast and tolerates quick-fixed bugs. Eighteen engineers rely on manual testing, product calls and early releases to a few customers. Will accepts bugs if they are fixed quickly. Changes are shipped fast to win deals, and enterprise deals often start in support conversations.
AI has not yet changed infrastructure. Will says AI has changed the development lifecycle but not infrastructure. Agents are not ready to deploy critical systems. Northflank's secure runtime and GPU support suit AI startups and GPU clouds such as CoreWeave, Together AI and Lambda Labs.
How the founders raised money
They listed European accelerators that accepted remote founders and offered cloud credits.
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On this episode 2
Show 1
They applied to one in Paris and pitched without saying they had never met in person.
Will paid for a Eurostar ticket on his overdraft and met Fred face to face for the first time.
Will dropped out of university and left his placement at about 22 to work full time.
Angel investor Larry introduced them to Steve Yang of Kindred Ventures.
Kindred closed the pre-seed round over Zoom in early 2020, about two weeks before COVID.