We have known Kurt Mackey and his team at Fly.io for many years and witnessed how they have built a strong contender to the major cloud providers and content delivery network (CDNs). Going up against these incumbents is an ambitious task, but the developer enthusiasm and exponential user growth speaks to the massive need Fly is filling in the market. That is why when Geodesic Capital had the opportunity to invest in the Series C, we were more than excited to participate.
Arguably the biggest shift in web application development over the last 10 years has centered around figuring out how front-end developers should access data. Distributed systems make development for the web slow; CDNs largely solve accessing static content, but modern, cloud-native applications involving read/write operations need back-end infrastructure that can handle dynamic processes whose compute scales with usage. Major cloud providers are region locked, with only a small percentage of users running applications in multiple regions simultaneously. The large cloud providers such as AWS, Azure and GCP target traditional enterprises who have historically run their own data centers, and their services optimize for what users deploy into a single datacenter.
Investing in Fly was ultimately an opinionated bet on the future of cloud computing, one that represented a continuation of the supercycle of shifting workloads from on-prem to the cloud. Moving workloads to highly-local cloud infrastructure benefits multiple stakeholders through low-latency, highly scalable, and consistently reliable applications. Cloud service providers (CSPs), CDNs, and application platforms each have significant drawbacks that prevent developers from opting for multi-region capabilities as default, all of which Fly is optimized to solve for. CSPs primarily rely on multi-region deployment to support redundancy in case of a software or hardware failure and CDNs are limited to short-runtimes and Javascript-based applications to deliver web content quickly.
What Fly is building is becoming foundational technology. Developers want the ability to simultaneously deploy applications closest to the end user across multiple regions globally. Fly made the bet that you have to own your server infrastructure to service this need at an attractive cost, and that bet is paying off. They service 33 regions to date with more coming at a rapid pace. And with the rise of generative AI applications, there has been a wave of demand for running machine models close to end users. The team at Fly has started to offer GPUs to meet this need. This is just one example of the team’s constant focus on evolving its product to build the ultimate cloud product that developers love, and we at Geodesic think the future for Fly is bright.