Fly.io, a cloud infrastructure company that runs app servers and databases close to end users, today announced that it has raised $70 million in new funding to add new features and expand its global footprint.

EQT Ventures led the Series C funding round with participation from Dell Technologies Capital and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Intel Capital Corp. The funding round follows $25 million raised from investors in July, bringing the total raised by Fly.io over $115 million.

The value proposition of Fly.io is to enable developers to easily launch applications and databases on cloud infrastructure as close to their users as possible with as little fuss as possible. This is important because when it comes to many applications, low latency is key and running on the edge reduces it as much as possible.

However, the problem is that while most application developers want to run closer to their users, not all developers have the time or the energy to figure out how to take advantage of the tools needed to build and run on custom cloud instances.

The issue, Kurt Mackey, co-founder and chief executive of Fly.io explained in a blog post, was that developers with critical needs might spend their time getting it to work, but the developer of a bookstore or restaurant app would probably give up. He called this the “two-hour problem.”

“The game server team will bang on edge deployment until it’s solved,” Mackey said. “The bookstore team will try for about two hours, not find a clear path forward, and then give up and move on to other things. We think everybody understands that it’d be better to run close to users rather than in the internet’s least worst data center.”

Fly.io launched in 19 regions and has since expanded to over 33. With the new funding, Mackey said that the company intends to continue expanding to more data centers to allow developers to get their applications as close to their users as possible. The company also intends to begin offering graphical processing units with the intent of providing hardware-accelerated coverage for artificial intelligence workloads.

Mackey added that with this funding the company has even bigger plans for more capabilities for developers including real-time features and user presence. The platform also intends to integrate security features such as encryption and secrets storage alongside clustered database options.

“So our bet is simple: With the right platform and toolchain, people building bookstores, sandwich rating apps, music recommenders, mailing list managers for churches, and every other kind of app will build apps that run fast globally,” said Mackey.

Image: Pixabay