Fly.io, a tech startup whose public cloud infrastructure enables developers to deploy applications, has raised $70 million in a funding round that values the company at $467 million.
The Series C round was led by EQT Ventures, with participation from Dell Technologies Capital and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Intel Capital Corp.
“It really feels like a lot of developers and increasingly, enterprises, are tired of public cloud hegemony and are ready for a breath of fresh air, which I think Fly really offers,” Laura Yao, a partner at EQT Ventures, said in an interview.
Fly, which operates data centers in 37 regions around the world, will use the new funds to invest in graphics processing units. The company is set to begin offering GPUs, a type of hardware that can handle multiple data at once and is a key component of artificial intelligence infrastructure, from chip giant Nvidia Corp.
Kurt Mackey, Fly’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said the company is roughly 18 months from profitability and also plans to increase headcount from around 70 to 120 over that period.
“We built our own infrastructure instead of running on a public cloud,” Mackey said in an interview. “So we actually have a lot more pricing control and a lot more ability to become profitable than we would if we were just giving Google or AWS money for outbound bandwidth.”
Mackey previously founded startup Compose, which was acquired by International Business Machines Corp. in 2015. Fly’s other customers include Walmart Labs, Fanatics Inc., Cars.com Inc., and Supabase.
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(Corrects amount raised in headline and first paragraph.)
