Cloud-native programming language startup Wing Cloud Ltd. is exiting stealth mode today armed with a hefty $20 million in seed funding.

Today’s round was led by an impressive list of venture capital firms, including Battery Ventures, Grove Ventures and StageOne Ventures. Secret Chord Ventures, Cerca Partners and Operator Partners also participated in the round, as did a host of notable angel investors, including Datadog Inc. President Amit Agarwal, HashiCorp Inc. co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Armon Dadgar, Salto Inc. founder Benny Schnaider and Stedi Inc. founder Zach Kanter.

Wing Cloud is the creator of the open-source Wing Programming Language, known as Winglang, which combines infrastructure and runtime code in a unified, cloud-oriented programming model. Winglang offers a built-in local simulator and an observability and debugging console.

According to Wing Cloud, Winglang is designed to fuse infrastructure and application code into a unified model in order to help developers tackle the challenges of building cloud-native applications. Those challenges include the need to deeply understand numerous cloud infrastructure layers, identity and access management or IAM roles, networking, and an array of tools, plus the need to handle testing and debugging of code.

Wing Cloud co-founder and Chief Executive Elad Ben-Israel (pictured, center) told SiliconANGLE that Winglang helps developers by abstracting away the “gritty details” of building applications on top of cloud infrastructure. “The cloud has evolved into an incredibly powerful computing platform, but customers still find themselves having to deal with burdensome tasks across security, networking, deployment and operations to build and manage even the simplest systems,” he said.

The Winglang compiler overcomes these problems by producing a ready-to-deploy package of code that includes infrastructure-as-code definitions for Terraform, CloudFormation and other cloud provisioning engines, plus Node.js code that’s designed to run on cloud compute platforms such as AWS Lambda, Kubernetes and edge platforms.

“The fact that the language supports both infra and code in the same language reduces a lot of the boilerplate and glue developers have to deal with today when they need to stitch their code to the infrastructure around it,” Ben-Israel said. “For instance, minimal IAM policies in Wing can be automatically calculated based on the actual interaction between the runtime code and the cloud, so developers don’t have to deal with them directly.”

Wing Cloud is also addressing challenges around the unclear boundary between application and infrastructure ownership. To do so, it has announced the private beta launch of its first commercial product, which is a visual cloud management platform that gives developers and operators a shared, real-time view of an app’s architecture and data flow.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that application developers face some big challenges around the intricacies, complexities and oddities of proprietary cloud environments. “Enterprises lose a significant part of their developer capacity in managing these intricacies, and it slows down the velocity of application development,” he said. “These problems call for a cloud infrastructure-independent programming language, with compatibility delivered via a translation mechanism. This is what Winglang is doing.”

Although Winglang is still a very young programming language, Ben-Israel said it has attracted interest from a host of big technology companies, including Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp., HashiCorp, Pulumi Inc., Apple Inc., Qualcomm Inc., RedHat Inc. and Twitter Inc., to name just some. “We are getting feedback from the open source community and improving it every day,” he said. “Hopefully the news will reach a lot of cloud developers who have never heard of Winglang before.”

Datadog President Agarwal said building and running scalable applications in the cloud is a complex engineering challenge, but one that enterprises have to overcome for various commercial and data residency reasons. Wing Cloud, he said, both abstracts away the underlying cloud infrastructure and takes advantage of technical features of specific cloud providers as needed.

Images: Wing Cloud