A Chicago startup led by a CEO who sold his previous company to IBM has raised funding from some big-name investors.
Fly.io announced it raised $37 million across two rounds of funding. It unveiled a $12 million Series A round led by Intel that it closed last year, and a $25 million Series B it raised this summer. The most recent round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Other investors in the Series B included Dell Technologies Capital, Initialized Capital and PlanetScale CEO Sam Lambert.
Founded in 2017, Fly.io has now raised more than $40 million to date. The startup has developed a public cloud where developers can run applications and databases more efficiently. Its customers include companies like Cars.com and Fanatics, who use Fly.io to make their websites more responsive for their customers.
In a blog post announcing the funding, Andreessen Horowitz said Fly.io is "one of the fastest-growing core infrastructure companies we have ever seen."
Fly.io is led by CEO and co-founder Kurt Mackey, who sold his previous business Compose to IBM in 2015. Compose, originally known as MongoHQ, raised $6 million in funding from Y Combinator and other investors.
Fly.io's platform uses a global network of servers to accept visitor traffic, run middleware on requests and then route them to backend applications, the company said. It also helps developer teams save time and money by allowing them to better collaborate.
The startup says its business has grown "eightfold" in the past year and has doubled over the last three months. Fly.io has around 30 employees with plans to hire additional engineers and developers.
