Application modernization startup vFunction Inc. today said it raised $12.2 million in seed funding and unveiled a platform that it said enables organizations to transform software written in the Java programming language into microservices via a scalable and repeatable assembly-line process.

The company said its namesake platform combines dynamic analysis, static analysis, data science and automation to extract any service from a monolithic application and transform it into a microservice that can be compiled to gain cloud-native-like benefits such as elasticity, reduced cost and reusability.

A microservice is a type of service-oriented architecture that can be used to build applications as collections of small, loosely coupled services. Each runs as a separate discrete process and communicates with other services through application programming interfaces.

VFunction targeted Java because of the large number of applications that have been built in the language, particularly by financial institutions, said Chief Executive Moti Rafalin. He cited statistics from Java owner Oracle Corp. that said there are 21 billion Java virtual machines in use and 12 million developers working with it. Java was the second most popular programming language in the world in 2020, according to Tiobe Software BV. It’s also the most popular server-side programming language for high-traffic websites, according to Q-Success DI Gelbmann GmbH.

The technology, which Rafalin said is already in production use at “some of the largest banks in the world, has been in development for three years and has spawned two pending patents. It isn’t a black box but a vehicle to identify functions that can be converted to microservices and provide an automated means to do so, the company said. The cloud-based tool analyzes existing applications and identifies functions that can logically be broken out for conversion.

Developers in charge

Developers “control everything that’s happening, and they make the decisions because at the end of the day they’re the people who need to maintain it,” he said. VFunction can’t promise to convert every function, he said, but developers “have visibility and can make decisions.”

It also estimates schedules and automatically extracts functions that can be converted. A dashboard assesses the complexity and time needed to complete the modernization effort to enable organizations to prioritize, manage, control, measure and track the process from start to finish.

“The architect can decide which services to extract and then, with push of a button, create microservices based on the original code in an efficient manner with only the minimum required code,” Rafalin said. The converted code has well-defined APIs that can be accessed by other services.

Customers in production are seeing reductions in modernization time of 90% or more and almost eliminating the days-long manual process of assessing application dependencies by hand, the CEO said. The platform’s dashboard provides a rich set of analytical reports about the status of each application being modernized, complexity, usage and the estimated time needed to complete the modernization process.

The company will sell the product directly as well as through partnerships with systems integrators HCL Technologies Ltd., Tata Consultancy Service Ltd. and Wipro Ltd. and through platform providers like Red Hat Inc. Pricing is on a per-application basis but vFunction didn’t provide details.

The funding round was led by Engineering Capital LLC, Shasta Ventures Management LLC and Zeev Ventures LLC, with participation from Khosla Ventures LLC.

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