MetalBear, the startup behind the open source Kubernetes development tool mirrord, announced Tuesday it has raised $12.5 million in seed funding to expand its platform aimed at easing bottlenecks in modern cloud-native software development.
The round was led by TLV Partners with participation from TQ Ventures, MTF, Netz Capital and angel investors including David Cramer, co-founder of Sentry, and Ben Sigelman, co-creator of OpenTelemetry. The announcement coincided with MetalBear’s recognition as a Gartner “Cool Vendor” in container management.
The company says its tool addresses a central paradox: while artificial intelligence accelerates code generation, developers still struggle to test new code in realistic cloud environments. “AI can now generate code in seconds, but developers still face constant friction testing it,” said Eyal Bukchin, MetalBear’s chief technology officer and co-founder.
“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.”
Microservices architectures have made modern applications more scalable but also more complex. Developers working on a single service often rely on mock tests that fail to reflect real conditions, then wait hours or days to use staging environments. Some companies spend millions annually on per-developer cloud environments that remain inefficient.
MetalBear’s mirrord allows developers to link local code to remote cloud environments instantly, without deployment. By intercepting input/output operations and proxying them to cloud services, mirrord lets code run locally as if inside the full application.
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MetalBear CTO Eyal Bukchin and CEO Aviram Hasson
(Photo: Omer Hacohen)
“The first time developers use mirrord, they often can’t believe what they’re seeing,” said MetalBear CEO and co-founder Aviram Hassan. “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.”
The open source solution has been adopted by teams at NVIDIA, AWS and Apple. MetalBear says teams report test iterations 80% faster and 30% fewer production bugs. Its paid version enables multiple developers to work in the same staging environment without conflicts by routing traffic to the right user.
“As AI makes developers write code faster, testing and integration become the critical bottlenecks,” said Brian Sack, partner at TLV Partners. “mirrord’s architecture is uniquely positioned to enable this new era of development.”
MetalBear’s founders previously worked in cybersecurity leadership roles at BioCatch, where they built behavioral analytics systems. That expertise, the company says, allows mirrord to function in complex enterprise settings such as air-gapped clusters and service meshes without major configuration.
Founded by Hassan and Bukchin, MetalBear has 25 employees across 14 countries. Its tools are available both as open source and as an enterprise platform designed for large-scale teams.