Unikraft, the first truly millisecond-native and highly scalable cloud platform, has officially launched its flagship offering, Unikraft Cloud. The platform is specifically designed to handle the growing complexity of AI-driven cloud workloads. Alongside this launch, Unikraft raised $6 million in a seed round led by Heavybit, with participation from Vercel Ventures, Mango Capital, Firestreak, Fly VC, First Momentum Ventures, and strategic angel investors. Notably, this round marks Vercel Ventures’ first startup investment.
As AI-generated applications, agents, and code continue to expand, traditional cloud infrastructure struggles to keep pace. Constantly running, resource-intensive systems have become an economic bottleneck, a challenge Gartner predicts will worsen, with 50% of all cloud resources expected to support AI workloads in the near future.
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Unikraft addresses these challenges by leveraging unikernels, a little-used technology that creates lightweight, specialized operating system images containing only the essential components for a single application. By re-engineering cloud infrastructure with unikernels, Unikraft achieves 10–100x reductions in cost and footprint, while providing speed, efficiency, and secure isolation for production environments.
Developed in 2017 at NEC Laboratories Europe by computer scientists Felipe Huici, Simon Keunzer, and Alexander Jung, Unikraft received backing from The Linux Foundation in 2019 and became a corporate entity in 2022. The project’s technology paper won the EuroSys Best Paper Award in 2021.
“Legacy cloud infrastructure was never designed for the scale and unpredictability of today’s AI workloads,” said Felipe Huici, Unikraft’s co-founder and CEO. “We’ve spent the better part of a decade rethinking cloud from first principles to deliver significant speed, scalability, and security gains at a fraction of the cost. It’s the foundation companies need to keep pace with the next wave of AI applications.”
Unikraft Cloud enables millisecond cold starts, instant scale-to-zero autoscaling, and the ability to run 10,000–100,000+ strongly isolated virtual machines per server, dramatically reducing compute costs and maintaining hardware-level security. The platform integrates seamlessly with developer tools like Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Grafana.
Several enterprises are already seeing transformational results. “With Unikraft, we can run over 100,000 strongly isolated PostgreSQL instances on a single machine,” said Soren Bramer Schmidt, founder and CEO of Prisma. “That density is unheard of in traditional architectures and fundamentally changes the economics of the game.”
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“With Unikraft, we successfully scaled our enterprise web agent infrastructure to handle increased demand while maintaining the reliability and performance standards our enterprise customers expect,” said Shuhao Zhang, co-founder and CPO of TinyFish.
“Choosing Unikraft to power our platform was one of the best decisions we’ve made,” said Alex Greaves, co-founder of Flutterflow.
Heavybit will join Unikraft’s board, with Fly VC taking a board observer seat. “AI is changing the speed and scale at which companies build software. Cloud infrastructure hasn’t kept pace,” said Tom Drummond, founder of Heavybit.
“When code is generated by AI and deployed automatically, the infrastructure behind it must be radically faster and lighter,” said Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel. “That’s why Vercel Ventures invested in Unikraft: its cloud infrastructure technology provides exponentially higher efficiency and scalability, along with the strong isolation this new frontier demands.”
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