This article originally appeared in our sister publication the Boston Business Journal.
Architect.io, a Boston-based cloud startup, is emerging from stealth mode with a $1.5 million pre-seed round.
The round was co-led by NextGen Venture Partners, owned by investment giant Brown Advisory, and Comcast Ventures, the venture investing arm of Comcast. The startup has four full-time employees based near South Station.
Architect.io CEO David Thor, who co-founded the company with T.J. Higgins, was an early employee at identity verification startup Confirm, which Facebook acquired in 2018 for an undisclosed sum. Thor, formerly director of engineering at Confirm, stayed at the social media giant through 2018 before launching Architect.io in early 2019.
In an exclusive interview with the Boston Business Journal, Thor said that he started the company in large part to solve problems that he had been experiencing as an engineering manager at a variety of different stages, startups and Facebook alike.
"Most of my problems had to do with operating an engineering team, enabling them to collaborate and enabling them to design software without letting infrastructure or any other things that should support the engineering team get in the way of their own decision-making," Thor said.
The company's software product, Architect, aims to help development teams build, manage, and deploy cloud applications. Over the past years, some developers have been focused on so-called "containerization," a trend in software development that makes it easy to encapsulate code.
"But what (containerization) lacked was the awareness of the things outside of itself ... it needs to connect to other programming interfaces and API, other services created by other teams. And as cloud applications get more complicated, that need to connect to other services becomes more and more important," Thor said. "And our form and function is to add to that awareness ... so we can blow through that connection automatically and create otherwise complicated cloud infrastructure.
The team spent all 2019 designing a framework that had the company's customers in mind, Thor said, and is ready to open it up to a wider audience. He declined to share current customers' names, but added that Architect will be available under a software-as-a-service revenue model.
The investment worth $1.5 million is also the company's total funding to date, according to Thor.
