Swedish startup Encoretivity AB is making waves today after raising $3 million in seed funding to build out what it says is the first back-end development engine that enables developers to build scalable, distributed systems rapidly in the cloud.

Today’s round was led by Crane Venture Partners and included participation from Acequia Capital, Essence Venture Capital and Third Kind Venture Capital. Bucky Moore, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, and Mehdi Ghissassi, head of product at Google DeepMind, also participated in the round as angel investors.

Alongside the round, Encore, as the company prefers to be known, announced that its Encore Backend Engine based on the open-source Encore Go Framework is now generally available.

The launch could well be a big milestone for cloud application developers. Until now, their life has been one of hours spent composing applications by mixing various components from cloud infrastructure providers, writing repetitive code to ensure they all work together.

What Encore does is it removes the need to configure, connect and set up each of these cloud components manually. Its back-end development engine enables key capabilities such as automatic distributed tracing, fully automated setup and management of cloud infrastructure, preview environments and live reloads, plus portability between different cloud providers.

Encore was founded by Chief Executive Officer André Eriksson and others who say they spent years designing and building distributed back-end systems earlier in their careers at companies such as Google LLC and Spotify Inc. They were forced to scale up those systems manually to millions of users while catering to a constantly expanding set of product features. Oftentimes, they felt as if they were overwhelmed by crippling complexity.

Eriksson said Encore frees developers from this complexity and allows them to be more creative and focus on building innovative cloud products, without worrying how everything ties together.

“Encore offers a developer experience unlike any other, by making it possible to build and deploy in the cloud in minutes, without worrying about the complexities of cloud architecture,” he explained. “By enabling developers to move freely between cloud providers over time, Encore represents the first clear path to cloud independence.”

Encore’s Backend Engine relies on the Encore framework, plus static analysis to understand the applications that developers are building and ensure they work seamlessly with the cloud infrastructure they’re deployed on. It provides an array of tools for writing modern cloud software without any setup, including built-in continuous integration/continuous deployment or CI/CD, the ability to write code free from boilerplate, automated provisioning of infrastructure on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, test environments, authentication, automatic documentation and more.

Another key advantage of Encore is that, unlike other developer tools, it’s not a cloud hosting provider. So developers can simply use their own cloud accounts with each cloud provider they use and retain full control of their data.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that more and more code needs to be written to take care of the ever-increasing automation needs of the 21st century. But up until now, he said, no one has worried about the automation needs of the developers themselves.

“Most of the focus has been on increasing developer velocity on the front-end side, while the back-end development has been neglected,” Mueller said. “So it’s good to see startups like Encore are now looking at this space and receiving funding to improve developer productivity in other areas.”

Here’s a preview of Encore’s Backend Engine in action:

Crane Venture Partners co-founder Krishna Visvanathan said he’s backing Encore because it dramatically changes the developer experience. “It stands apart because of its ability to deeply understand source code and automate what would otherwise slow development and business to a halt,” he said.

Image: Encore