Hyphen AI Inc., a startup focused on eliminating the DevOps tax from software development, has launched its first product and raised $5 million in seed funding.

Hyphen Deploy is a cloud deployment platform that uses artificial intelligence to turn developer intent into production-ready infrastructure. It eliminates the need for scripts, configuration files, Helm charts and other time-consuming setup elements and replaces them with prompts and menus.

“We’re not trying to make DevOps easier; we’re trying to make it disappear,” said Hyphen founder and Chief Executive Jared Wray. “Developers should be able to architect, run, scale and manage their apps without needing to wait for a [site reliability engineer] to show up.”

DevOps without the Ops

Wray, a cloud startup veteran, founded Hyphen after observing that provisioning cloud infrastructure had become so complex that developers no longer were able or willing to go through the process.

“The promise of cloud was to empower developers,” Wray said, “but now, if you don’t have an SRE on your team, you’re stuck. Developers are still burning 20% of their time on configuration.”

Hyphen Deploy flips that script. Developers describe their latency, availability, compliance and other needs, and the platform generates all the necessary setup code. It provisions containers, configures cloud infrastructure, allocates services, sets policies and spins up deployments automatically across Amazon Web Services Inc., Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Corp. Azure and Cloudflare Inc. platforms.

“Infrastructure automation typically takes weeks to set up and configure, and then there’s monthly maintenance on those configurations,” Wray said. “Deploy reduces it to minutes.”

Deploy uses multiple AI systems behind the scenes, including large language models to understand codebases and generative models to build Docker images and deployment architectures. Unlike general-purpose LLMs, Hyphen wraps its AI in policy-based guardrails to ensure reliable, repeatable infrastructure builds, Wray said.

“You can’t just ask a chatbot to write a Kubernetes manifest and hope it works,” he said. “Nine times out of 10, [a generic LLM] will get it wrong. We put best practices in those engines, and then we put guardrails around it, so we know that it’s actually going to deploy successfully.”

Deploy also handles configuration drift, which is what occurs when a system’s configuration gradually deviates from its original state due to manual changes, software updates or other modifications. There are no stored manifests or configuration files to update, Wray said. Instead, every deployment is a fresh, real-time synthesis of the current application, requirements and policies.

“The system re-analyzes and rebuilds everything from scratch with each deploy,” Wray said. “It’s like having an AI SRE who always knows the right answer.”

Multicloud by design

Deploy supports multiple clouds out of the box, letting developers spread workloads across providers without rewriting for each environment. To add Azure to a Google Cloud deployment, for example, developers just need to connect the account and redeploy. The system auto-wires load balancers, DNS and routing via Cloudflare and handles credentialing and access control.

“You retain control,” Wray said. “We just do the heavy lifting.”

Hyphen Deploy is offered as a cloud service, priced per user and by usage at 20 cents per minute during deployment. Wray said the first deployment typically takes five to 10 minutes, with subsequent ones completing in two to three.

The $5 million seed round was led by Unlock Venture Partners. Hyphen will use the funding for sales and to expand its platform. Support for private clouds, Red Hat OpenShift and native Kubernetes environments are on the roadmap.

Image: Ameotech Informatics/Flickr