Platformatic Inc., a San Francisco-based development tooling startup, today announced that it has closed a $3.5 million funding round led by Decibel Partners.

Panache Ventures participated as well along with several angel investors. Platformatic said that it will use the capital to grow its workforce. Additionally, the startup plans to build more features for its namesake software platform, which it announced today in conjunction with the funding round.

Platformatic’s platform is designed to streamline application development for enterprises. In particular, it focuses on easing the creation and maintenance of workloads based on a so-called microservices architecture. 

A microservices-based application is implemented not as a single piece of software, but rather in the form of multiple largely independent modules. Each such module runs in a separate software container. An e-commerce application’s shopping cart feature and product catalog, for example, might be implemented as two separate containers.

Each component of a microservices-based workload has its own application programming interface, or API, that it uses to exchange data with the other modules. The more modules a workloads includes, the more APIs developers have to learn and manage. That complexity makes software teams’ work more difficult in certain respects.

The first component of the platform, Platformatic Composition, is designed to ease API-related development tasks. It combines multiple application modules’ APIs into a single programming interface that is simpler for software teams to use. According to the company, developers can apply Platformatic Composition to their software without having to write any code.

The second component of the platform is called Platformatic Runtime. It’s designed to reduce the complexity associated with enabling an application’s different modules to exchange data with one another via their APIs.

In many cases, companies facilitate data transfers between their application modules using a type of software called a service mesh. Such software can be difficult to deploy and manage. Runtime removes the need for a service mesh by deploying multiple application modules in the same process, as if they were a single program rather than separate microservices.

And there’s a third tool called Platformatic Taxonomy. Developers can use it to map out how an application’s microservices interact with one another. According to the company, the tool will help developers more quickly find areas for improvement in their software.

Platformatic’s platform is available in an on-premises edition and as a managed service it operates. The latter provides offers a number of additional features, including observability tools for detecting technical issues.

“A modern enterprise needs to keep at pace with user demands without over-burdening platform engineering teams,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Luca Maraschi (pictured, right, with co-founder Matteo Collina).” Platformatic provides individual developers of all skill levels with an out-of-the box, modular platform engineering solution to cut infrastructure development work by up to 90%.”

Platformatic’s platform is based on an open-source framework called Fastify that was created by Collina. On occasion of its funding round today, the startup disclosed that the framework has been downloaded more than four million times to date. It’s used by Capital One Financial Corp., Walmart Inc. and hundreds of other companies. 

Photo: Platformatic