Why We Invested In LocalStack
November 12, 2024
For anyone in tech, it’s no secret: cloud development has transformed software as we know it, providing scalability, flexibility, and reliability at massive scale. But cloud development comes with hidden costs that most don’t talk about, especially when it comes to the developer experience. If you’re a developer, you know that moving fast on cloud infrastructure isn’t easy. Testing and deploying changes in the cloud can be time-consuming and expensive. Developers frequently need to push code to remote servers, wait for it to deploy, run tests – often with a second or third round of changes, before everything is just right. Each of these cycles costs valuable time and money, slowing down product teams that are eager to deliver their next big release.
Enter LocalStack: a complete, localized environment where developers can build, test, profile and debug infrastructure and code, cutting deployment time from 28 minutes to 24 seconds.
LocalStack simplifies and speeds up cloud development. Imagine having the cloud at your fingertips on your local machine—spinning up and AWS environment, testing code, and iterating instantly, all without having to push to the cloud. With LocalStack, developers can get high-fidelity cloud testing locally, allowing them to make changes, test, and deploy faster than ever. Developers and product teams benefit from an accelerated development cycle, which means faster innovation, quicker feedback loops, and ultimately, happier users.
Just look at LocalStack's success so far, with 8 million weekly sessions and a growing roster of more than 900 paying customers, from tech-driven startups to some of the world’s largest banks and enterprises including companies like Autodesk, Apple, Workday, and NASA to name a few.
LocalStack’s journey began as an open-source project. Co-Founder, Waldemar Hummer, had experienced the slow, costly testing cycles in cloud-based development first hand while working at Atlassian, following his PhD in Computer Science in the testing space. Waldemar teamed up with co-founder Gerta Sheganaku, who brought her own deep expertise in product management and testing.
The team developed the first version of LocalStack and released it under an open-source license, hoping to help other developers facing similar challenges. Soon after, LocalStack caught the attention of Jeff Barr, AWS’s chief evangelist, which led to a tweet that spurred thousands of stars on GitHub, overnight. With a lean team, Waldemar and Gerta have taken LocalStack from a widely used open-source tool, to a company serving Fortune 100 companies and thousands of developers globally.
At Notable Capital, we’ve spent two decades investing in the tools that enable developers to do their best work. LocalStack fits that mission perfectly. They’ve taken something complex, costly, and frustrating—cloud testing—and turned it into a fast, efficient, and reliable experience which produces faster development cycles and reduces the cost of infrastructure for enterprises. LocalStack’s product is already widely adopted, and the company has been able to grow with their very lean team to support companies ranging from startups to Fortune 100s.
As investors, we’re incredibly excited to be a part of LocalStack’s journey. Gerta and Waldemar have built a unique platform that helps developers work faster and more productively. With their open-source roots and commitment to solving real developer pain points, we believe they’re set up to make a major impact on the cloud ecosystem. We can’t wait to see where LocalStack goes from here.
