You develop locally, but when it comes to production you work in the cloud. Usually, the company also uses containers and microservices to make DevOps easier. In practice, this requires less maintenance but comes at the expense of flexibility and adaptability for the R&D team. A new Israeli startup, co-founded by an entrepreneur from Meta Israel’s development center, wants to solve this.

Bringing the capabilities of DevOps tools to development environments

The Israeli startup Raftt has developed a platform that adapts the infrastructures usually used by DevOps teams (like containers and microservices) to meet the needs of developers. These adaptations make it possible to create environments quickly and solve the challenges of using containers in development environments, such as a live update of containers and advanced debugging options. In a conversation with Geektime, the company's CEO and one of the founders – Roy Iarchy – explained that Raftt's environments are part of the code using existing tools (docker-compose, helm charts) and are linked to git branches, thus enabling "easy work with multiple environments and updating said environments to be in line with how developers are already managing their code."

He explained that by running Raftt environments in the cloud and linking them to the development team’s computers, their platform reduces the load on the computers and enables the sharing of live environments without harming the way it works. According to Iarchy, the company's product does not require complicated integration and after it's installed (which only takes several minutes) other developers can access it and create environments in seconds.

"The first changes that users notice is the speed of working with complex environments, and the convenience of not having to change the way they work or the tools they use," says Iarchy. According to him, Raftt's users also note that they are able to work more easily with multiple environments and share the environment with the product teams – which enables work in rapid iterations.

Raftt was founded last year by Roy Iarchy and Gahl Saraf (CTO), developers by training, who met while serving in intelligence in the IDF. Gahl served as a technology leader and architect at Meta, leading the development of the Facebook Lite application and Roy managed R&D groups at Skycure, which was acquired by Symantec.

"Eden Shochat's background only gives validity to the problem and our solution"

Today (Monday) Raftt launched from stealth with a seed round of $5 million. The round was led by Aleph and Cardumen Capital. Several private investors from the industry also participated in the round, including Ariel Maislos, who founded and sold Anobit to Apple; Benny Schneider, co-founder of Salto; Adi Sharabani, founder of Skycure (acquired by Symantec) and Snyk's CTO; and Ariel Assaraf, CEO of Coralogix.

You raised money from Eden Shochat from Aleph, who, in addition to being a former entrepreneur, is also a programmer– not something that is particularly common among investors. How was it? Did he immediately understand the pain? Comment on the product? Any fear of micromanagement later?

"Eden Shochat's background only gives validity to the problem and our solution. The fact that Eden comes from a technological background and experienced the pain firsthand created a deep connection to our product and the vision of the company. As developers ourselves, we know that each developer adapts his or her own ways of working and adopts the tools that suit him, and therefore our approach, which allows maximum flexibility for developers, is an approach that Eden identified with from the start.”