Jetpack.io founder Daniel Loreto has worked as an engineer at companies like Google, Airbnb, and Twitter, companies that had a lot of technical resources to build custom tools. But when he got his last job as an engineer at Verta Health, he found his developer team working hard on deploying infrastructure, and it distracted them from their primary job-building applications.
It’s a problem faced by many development teams that don’t have the resources of big companies like his previous employers. He decided to launch Jetpack.io to solve this infrastructure deployment problem for everyone.
He started building an end-to-end platform, but eventually abandoned that idea for a more modular approach. The first piece that comes out of that idea is called Devboxan open source development environment tool based on Nix.
Today, the startup announced the availability of Devbox Cloud in beta, cloud, a cloud version of the open source project. While it was going, the company revealed a $10 million investment in seeds, which closed a year ago but was previously unannounced.
Loreto said that when he worked at Verta, he saw that there were open source tools for deploying infrastructure like Kubernetes and Nix, but there was so much complexity around this tool that a lot of energy was spent on deploying the infrastructure to run the application, instead of building the application yourself.
“So we came to the conclusion that infrastructure should be treated as a product. And that infrastructure must be self-service and user-friendly. And so Jetpack is all about applying that kind of platform engineering mindset to the different parts of the stack in the cloud,” he said.
Devbox is a step in that direction. He built that first piece to reduce the complexity around using the Nix open source project for deploying development environments. Devbox Cloud goes even further by moving the environments to the cloud.
“So the two things we’re adding are basically making Nix easy to use without having to learn the Nix language, and then we can take that environment from on-premises to the cloud,” Loreto explains.
He plans to add additional features to the platform and has already released them Launch pad, a tool to simplify Kubernetes deployment. It will eventually also get a cloud version.
For now, Loreto plans to keep the business lean, stay disciplined, and let customers take the lead on expansion. “So I try to be very disciplined in terms of how we spend money and make sure that when we spend money, it’s because we’ve heard the right feedback from the customers,” he said.
With only 10 employees so far, he keeps his word. As an immigrant founder from Venezuela, while expanding the workforce over time, he is eager to build an inclusive workplace. “Since I identify with being an underrepresented minority, I think I wanted to grow the business [a diverse] from the very beginning,” he said.
The $10 million seed was co-led by Coatue and GV.
