Cloud coding startup Codesphere Inc. has raised €4.5 million ($5.11 million) in new funding to hire more people, further develop its platform and open a second data center.

LEA Partners led the seed round. Also participating in the round were 42CAP, NewForge, 468 Capital and angel investors from Shopify, Google Cloud and Digital Ocean. Including the new funding, Codesphere has raised $6.11 million to date, according to data from Crunchbase.

Founded in 2020 by former Google engineer Elias Groll and Jonas Zipprick, Codesphere was created as an alternative to expensive and fragmented development platforms. Pitched as “your zeroconfig cloud,” the company’s platform is just that: No configuration is required with users being able to code and run web apps from their browser.

Codesphere says that allows startups of all sizes to spin up web apps with one click at a fraction of the time and cost compared to existing solutions. In turn, the company adds, that saves startups months compared twithsetting up similar environments in Amazon Web Services Inc. and gives startups a simple way to run complex applications.

Instead of coding on a laptop and deploying the code to utterly different infrastructures, Codesphere enables developers to code in an environment similar to their live system. Rather than relying on fragmented toolsets, Codesphere combines traditional cloud infrastructure – deployment, databases, storage and compute – with the complete toolchain of a web-based integrated development platform. That includes collaboration tools and integration with services like GitHub and Code Assist.

Notably, Codesphere both owns and manages the front-end platform and back-end infrastructure, including databases and data centers. The company claims that allows it to offer faster, dedicated speeds and storage, and greater data controls and reassurance to customers.

Despite its relatively young age, Codesphere has already found a willing audience. Since launching in March, the platform now has 26,000 active users and is growing at a rate of up to 1,000 sign-ups a day.

“Throughout my early career, even at Google, I found it extremely time-consuming and complex to bring even the simplest apps to production with tools like AWS and Kubernetes,” Chief Executive Officer Groll said in a statement. “DevOps doesn’t get any easier when you need to scale to thousands of users. I immediately wanted to build my alternative.”

Groll added that “with Codesphere, our focus is on creating a smooth, efficient and cost-effective infrastructure for developers by stripping back the complexity.”

Image: Codesphere