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 existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Dell Technologies Capital and Intel Capital.
“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.
“A lot of the hiring we’ve done so far has been just to make it really, really reliable and then to make sure we can sustainably grow this stuff,” Mackey said in an interview. “I think expansion plans are probably mostly go-to-market.”
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.
“We built our own infrastructure instead of running on a public cloud,” Mackey said. “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.”
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(Adds CEO quote in sixth paragraph. An earlier version of this story corrected the amount raised by Fly.io.)
