Danish startup Rig.dev raises €2M to develop its open source platform for Kubernetes

This week, Danish startup Rig.dev raised €2 million in one of the largest pre-seed rounds in Danish history. 

The company has developed an open-source solution built on top of Kubernetes that helps developers build scalable backend and cloud infrastructure faster. 

This allows developers to spend more time coding the user-facing part of their software.

Co-founder Thor Christensen told me that the company emerged out of the evolution of exploring various hypotheses to solve developer pain points and a lot of conversations with developers:

"Every time we discussed different hypotheses and came back from meetings with developers, we tended to move more and more towards being heavier on the infrastructure and deployment."

Rig.dev co-founder Anders Johnsen is a former developer at both Uber and Google and shared about how their solutions helped backend developers save time: 

"Even though you're building a backend component, you expect it will take some time to get something up and running. And when you have your 'hello world' up and running, you're like, 'Oh, I'm halfway done.'

Because now you've done all the tooling around it. I like to get people to that point quicker. 

You still want control as a backend developer. But you also want to save time. As you grow as you develop, you have a framework to do it in so that all the components you build, use the same template.

So you don't suddenly get things spinning into infrastructure that breaks the pattern you're building up; you have to build your tooling to maintain these different versions."

He contends that existing solutions are too restrictive and not made for fast-growing and complicated projects. 

"We give the power back to the developers, who, unlike today, can choose exactly which databases and technologies they want to use when developing." 

Over 5.6 million developers use Kubernetes as part of their cloud infrastructure, and by combining the flexibility and scalability of Kubernetes, the company asserts it will set a new standard for software infrastructure that can scale to millions of users.

Besides making it easier for developers to build and manage backend applications, Rig.dev's compatibility with Kubernetes makes it easier to deploy and scale. 

This is usually incredibly complex and requires strong knowledge of DevOps and infrastructure. 

With Rig.dev, developers used to working with Kubernetes will maintain control and save a lot of time, while newer developers can get started with less complexity. 

Strong user engagement from the get-go 

Even though its early days for the company, Rig.dev started building a community that can, in the future, become customers from day one. 

During the initial prototyping stages, Rig.dev was a small two-person company that prioritised the question: "How can we ensure that people have access to our product from day one?" This w

A lesson on how to fundraise during an economic downturn

The €2M investment funders include byFounders, Dreamcraft, and NP-Hard Ventures, as well as numerous smaller venture funds and business angels.

The company utilised a systematic approach to fundraising, with Christensen explaining that the company decided early on to spend an initial five months upfront, exploring different hypotheses and talking to many developers and open source companies to get their learnings on how to talk with VCs. 

"Like most things we do, we tried to make our own framework. So we went about it in a structured way to ensure that we talked to the right VCs at the right time."

The funds will help scale the team, further develop the product and begin commercialisation.

Lead image: Rig.dev team shot provided by Rig.dev.