MetalBear Raises $12.5M to Bring Instant Production-Like Testing to Developers in the AI Era

As AI speeds up coding, Metalbear's mirrord enables developers to run local code in real cloud environments instantly, closing the gap between coding and deployment.

TEL AVIV, Israel, Sept. 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- MetalBear, creator of the popular open source Kubernetes development solution mirrord, today announced it has raised $12.5 million in Seed funding led by TLV Partners with participation from TQ Ventures, MTF, and Netz Capital. Prominent angel investors include David Cramer, co-founder of Sentry, and Ben Sigelman, co-creator of OpenTelemetry. The funding comes as enterprises confront a paradox: while AI dramatically accelerates code creation, developers continue to waste valuable time waiting to test code in realistic cloud environments.

The rise of microservices architecture has transformed how modern software is built, with enterprises now managing hundreds or thousands of interconnected services. Yet this evolution has created a critical bottleneck: developers working on a single service cannot effectively test their code within the context of the larger application. They resort to incomplete local testing with mocks that don't reflect real cloud conditions, then queue for hours and even days to access shared staging environments. Some organizations spend millions annually on per-developer cloud environments, only to find these still require deployment cycles and shift maintenance burdens onto individual developers, creating yet more bottlenecks.

"We're witnessing a mismatch in modern development," said Eyal Bukchin, CTO and co-founder of MetalBear. "AI can now generate code in seconds, but developers still face constant friction testing it. Every small change requires another deployment cycle, another wait, another context switch. These interruptions compound throughout the day, turning what should be rapid iteration into a stop-and-start marathon. The entire industry has accepted this as normal, but it's actually the biggest hidden bottleneck in software development today."

MetalBear's mirrord fundamentally changes this dynamic by letting developers connect their local code directly to their cloud environments. With a single switch in their IDE, developers can instantly give their code access to remote databases, APIs, queues, and services without deploying anything. The technology works by injecting itself into the local development process and intercepting all input/output operations at a low level, seamlessly proxying them to the remote environment.

"The first-time developers use mirrord, they often can't believe what they're seeing," said Aviram Hassan, CEO and co-founder of MetalBear. "They toggle a button in their IDE, hit debug, and suddenly their local code is interacting with other microservices, remote databases, message queues, and third-party services as if it were running in the cloud. We've even seen teams where mirrord lets them run their code locally for the first time. Before, there were just too many dependencies to run locally, so all they could do was deploy and hope."

mirrord has already been adopted by thousands of developers at leading technology companies including NVIDIA, AWS, and Apple, with teams reporting 80% faster test iterations and 30% fewer production bugs. Its paid enterprise version enables multiple developers to work simultaneously on the same environment without conflicts, using traffic routing and queue splitting to ensure each developer only receives the data meant for their specific tests. This allows entire teams to share a single staging environment as if each developer had their own, eliminating both bottlenecks and costs.

"There's intense focus on AI and developer productivity right now, but most solutions only address code generation," said Brian Sack, Partner at TLV Partners. "As AI makes developers write code faster, testing and integration become the critical bottlenecks. When every AI agent needs their own test environment, traditional approaches become completely unscalable. mirrord's architecture is uniquely positioned to enable this new era of development."

mirrord's approach leverages deep system-level expertise rarely seen in the DevOps space. The founding team has a deep expertise in cybersecurity, most recently as a core part of the leadership at BioCatch where they built behavioral analytics systems. This experience enabled them to build mirrord to handle complex enterprise environments, from air-gapped clusters to complex service meshes, without requiring cluster modifications or extensive setup.

About MetalBear

MetalBear is the creator of mirrord, an open source development solution that eliminates bottlenecks in cloud-native development by enabling local code to run in production-like conditions instantly. Founded by cybersecurity experts Aviram Hassan (CEO) and Eyal Bukchin (CTO), the company helps developers ship faster, more reliable software. With 25 employees across 14 countries, MetalBear serves thousands of developers at Fortune 100 enterprises and leading technology companies. mirrord is available as both an open source project and an enterprise solution that allows large teams to effectively share a single cloud development environment. Learn more at metalbear.com

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SOURCE MetalBear