Unikraft Raises $6M From Heavybit And Vercel Ventures To Revolutionize AI Cloud Speed With Millisecond-Native Platform

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Unikraft, a startup that spent nearly a decade engineering solutions to wasteful computing, announced Oct. 10 that it raised $6 million to commercialize technology that could transform how companies deploy AI workloads.

The seed round was led by Heavybit, with participation from Vercel Ventures, Mango Capital, Firestreak Ventures, Fly VC, and First Momentum Ventures. The investment marks the first startup backing from Vercel Ventures, according to Unikraft's statement.

The San Francisco company simultaneously launched Unikraft Cloud, a platform engineered to handle unpredictable AI-driven workloads through unikernel technology.

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Why Traditional Cloud Infrastructure Cannot Handle AI Scale

Existing cloud platforms struggle as artificial intelligence workloads multiply at exponential rates, according to Unikraft. Gartner forecasts 50% of cloud resources will support AI workloads in the coming years, creating severe economic strain on always-on infrastructure.

Traditional virtual machines carry gigabyte-sized images to run applications requiring only megabytes, Unikraft said. According to the company, resource-heavy infrastructure has become an economic bottleneck likely to worsen as AI-generated code and autonomous agents proliferate.

Unikraft co-founder and CEO Felipe Huici spent eight years developing production-ready infrastructure at NEC Laboratories Europe before commercializing the technology. Huici worked alongside researchers Simon Keunzer and Alexander Jung to create the Unikraft OS project in 2017, according to the company.

“Legacy cloud infrastructure was never designed for the scale and unpredictability of today’s AI workloads,” Huici said in Unikraft’s statement. “We’ve spent the better part of a decade rethinking cloud from first principles to deliver significant speed, scalability, and security gains at a fraction of the cost.”

The Linux Foundation backed the open source project in 2019, and the team incorporated in 2022, according to Unikraft. Their research paper received the EuroSys Best Paper Award in 2021.

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How Unikernels Deliver 10-50 Milliseconds Cold Starts And Million-Instance Density

Unikraft Cloud operates on unikernels, lightweight operating system images combining minimal components required to run single applications. The company said this architecture enables cold starts between 10 to 50 milliseconds, even for heavyweight applications.

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The platform runs 10,000 to 100,000 strongly isolated virtual machines per server, enabling millions of workloads per rack. According to Unikraft, benchmarks show twice the requests per second at half the price compared to traditional virtual machine deployments.

The technology maintains hardware-level isolation while avoiding security compromises associated with containers. Unikraft said integration works through existing developer workflows, including Dockerfiles, Kubernetes, Prometheus and Grafana.

Prisma founder and CEO Soren Bramer Schmidt highlighted density achievements in production deployments. “With Unikraft, we can run over 100,000 strongly isolated PostgreSQL instances on a single machine,” he said in Unikraft’s statement. “That density is unheard of in traditional architectures and fundamentally changes the economics of the game.”

Enterprise customers, including TinyFish and Flutterflow, have deployed production workloads with transformational results, according to Unikraft.

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What Investors See In Millisecond-Native Cloud Architecture

Heavybit will join Unikraft’s board, while Fly VC adds a board observer seat.

“AI is changing the speed and scale at which companies build software. Cloud infrastructure hasn’t kept pace,” Heavybit founder and Managing Director Tom Drummond said in Unikraft’s statement.

Vercel Ventures founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch emphasized infrastructure requirements for automated deployment. He said the pace of AI-generated code means systems must evolve to support it, explaining that cloud foundations now need to be "far faster, leaner, and more efficient" to sustain continuous deployment at scale.

“That’s why Vercel Ventures invested in Unikraft: its cloud infrastructure technology provides exponentially higher efficiency and scalability, along with the strong isolation this new frontier demands,” Rauch added.

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This article Unikraft Raises $6M From Heavybit And Vercel Ventures To Revolutionize AI Cloud Speed With Millisecond-Native Platform originally appeared on Benzinga.com

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