Configuration Software Solutions Ltd., better known as Configu, said today it has raised $3 million in a pre-seed funding round.

The round was led by Cardumen Capital and backed by a number of notable angel investors, including Ariel Maislos, co-founder of Anobit Technologies Ltd., which was later acquired by Apple Inc.

The startup is focused on a very important part of the software development pipeline, providing a “configuration-as-code” service that helps to automate application configuration.

Configu says application configuration is a very neglected aspect of the development cycle. Most people think developers spend all of their time writing code, but they actually spend many hours configuring their applications too.

What’s more, as applications become increasingly dynamic and distributed, configurations are getting decidedly more fragmented than before. Modern apps today are reliant on an assortment of various technologies and their components can be stored across multiple back ends. There’s also a lack of standardization that causes major headaches for developers and often leads to misconfigurations.

Some organizations counter these problems with the use of infrastructure scripts or create their own, in-house configuration orchestration tools, but Configu argues that neither approach is that effective. In most cases, developers spend hours of their time wrangling configurations, yet still they often find themselves breaking production environments due to app misconfiguration.

So the startup is coming to the rescue with what it says is an “end-to-end application configuration orchestration platform” that’s designed to streamline app configuration processes and alleviate headaches around misconfiguration for DevOps teams. It said its platform supports collaboration between multiple developers and offers governance for environment variables, feature flags and any configuration related to code. It also helps provide greater visibility and improves reliability by standardizing the way application configurations are managed.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Peleg Porat said the startup’s platform is designed to automate every aspect of app configuration in order to speed up developer velocity. “We aspire to be the GitHub of application configuration, empowering developers to do their best work,” he added.

Software is becoming the lifeblood of enterprises and as its complexity increases, configuration has become an enormous challenge, analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE.

“It’s very difficult to configure software and applications, especially when companies are pushing out frequent updates, as is typical for most cloud apps,” Mueller said. “What’s more, the complexity takes on a new dimension when an app needs to interact with other software, as the configurations must be both compatible and collaborative. Developers spend a lot of time on this. So Configu looks like an interesting tool for developers, with its promise of helping them eliminate the massive headaches around configuration.”

Configu was founded in 2021 but it already counts an impressive list of customers, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 firms. Its platform supports all major clouds and developer tools, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, GitHub, Helm, Kubernetes and Terraform.

Maislos said he’s backing Config because every developer knows the problems that can be caused by application misconfigurations. “Nobody wants to be the next Meta, letting application misconfiguration cause a six-hour outage that costs $6 billion,” he said. “Configu offers a solution that can not only prevent this type of incident, but drastically improve the software development process.”

Image: Configu