Cosmonic Raises $8.5 Million Led by Vertex Ventures to Usher In Cloud Native WebAssembly

Funding will help accelerate evolution and in adoption of WebAssembly in industry, and help bring the first, feature-rich Wasm platform to developers everywhere

ARLINGTON, Va., Oct. 25, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- WebAssembly (Wasm) pioneer Cosmonic has closed $8.5 million in seed funding, led by Vertex Ventures with participation from a galaxy of high profile investors. Joining Vertex's General Partner In Sik Rhee in this early round is Meta advisor (and Facebook's ex-VP infrastructure engineering) Jeffrey Rothschild; WebLogic and funding syndicate founder Bob Pasker; Jeff Burkland (founder of financial consultancy Burkland Associates); Tom Killalea, chairman of the MongoDB board of directors, and VC firm General Advance. The round is also supported by Cosmonic co-founder and CEO Liam Randall's own Relentless VC. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The company will use its seed funding to accelerate the development of Cosmonic's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), a lightweight suite of Wasm-powered tools, features, and services that radically abstract complexity from application development and management. 

"We are on a mission to bring back joy to the art of developing cloud native software," said Randall. "The complexities of building modern distributed applications have brought developer productivity to a crawl, adding friction and unnecessary complexity to every stage of the development life cycle. This funding round will enable us to support developers working in early-stage, rapid and interactive environments -- allowing them to transform applications from napkin sketch to scale in minutes. Future releases will offer the advantages of high reliability and lower long-term software maintenance costs."

Cosmonic is built atop wasmCloud, the fast-growing Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project and the universal platform for composing distributed applications from portable business logic that runs anywhere, at any scale. wasmCloud exists to combine the power and possibility of using cloud native technologies with WebAssembly to design, develop, deploy, and maintain composable applications that plug into multi-cloud, multi-edge, and far-edge environments. wasmCloud increases the security of applications by executing all code in a deny-by-default, secure, stateless, and reactive WebAssembly sandbox.

wasmCloud eliminates 95% of code and entire classes of development challenges by treating non-functional application requirements (e.g. databases, servers) as composable components behind an abstraction. Launched in November 2020, wasmCloud has grown quickly to include over 100 core contributors and was accepted as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project in August 2021.

The Cosmonic platform introduces a fully managed, feature-rich environment which further abstracts complexity and boosts development velocity. Powered by Wasm, its intuitive suite of tools, features and services allow developers to adopt; operate; and rapidly scale applications across diverse devices and CPUs in any cloud or edge scenario.

"After collaborating with development teams at Adobe, BMW, Capital One, Microsoft and other mature organizations, we are confident that WebAssembly and the Cosmonic Wasm PaaS will forever change modern application development, deployment and management for distributed applications," said Randall. "This is certainly the next phase of digital transformation."

"We invested in Cosmonic to usher in a much-needed seismic change to the cloud native paradigm where developers can easily develop portable distributed applications. Cosmonic allows core business logic to run at near-native speeds on any cloud or any edge, including their own, while satisfying the strictest security, quality, scalability, and regulatory requirements. By abstracting layers of management complexity, Cosmonic offers developers a powerful tool for efficient and effective development and lifecycle management," said In Sik Rhee, General Partner at Vertex Ventures.

"WebAssembly offers an efficient and performant abstraction that enables engineers to develop applications with strong isolation and minimal dependencies, and the Cosmonic team is at the forefront of its adoption," said Killalea.

"Web Assembly has evolved into a high-performance, platform-agnostic sandbox environment for developing cloud native software components that run anywhere at scale," said Rothschild.  "With the rise of cloud native WebAssembly, I'm convinced Cosmonic – with its focus specifically on engineering technologies to accelerate WebAssembly and wasmCloud deployment -- has the potential to speed up the adoption of this important technology." 

Founded by open source veterans Liam Randall and Kevin Hoffman, Cosmonic is helping develop and promote wasmCloud PaaS, a universal runtime platform that enables developers to use cloud native technologies and Web Assembly to build portable, pluggable business logic that runs anywhere, including multi-cloud, multi-edge and far edge environments.  For more information, visit www.Cosmonic.com.

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SOURCE Cosmonic Corp