Qovery raises $4 million for its cloud deployment service

French startup Qovery has raised a $4 million seed funding round. The company integrates directly with your git repository and lets you deploy your code to a public cloud without having to manage the infrastructure yourself.

Qovery isn’t a hosting platform. It’s a service that deploys your application to Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean or Scaleway. Basically, it acts as an abstraction layer so that you don’t have to think about deployment. It’s a sort of Heroku, but for micro-services and modern cloud infrastructure.

Crane and Speedinvest are leading today’s funding round, with Techstars and various business angels participating, such as Alexis Le-Quoc (co-founder and CTO at Datadog) and Ott Kaukver (CTO at Checkout.com, formerly CTO at Twilio).

The company’s vision is quite clear. Developers should spend more time coding and less time managing the cloud infrastructure. If you’re using GitHub or GitLab, you can connect your repository with Qovery directly. You then basically authorize Qovery to manage your AWS account for you.

Qovery also lets you create multiple environments. For instance, you may want to separate your production environment from your staging environment.

With today’s funding round, the company will expand the engineering team and build sales and marketing teams. Qovery also promises that support for Google Cloud Platform is coming really soon. It should be live by the end of the year.

“When building a product on top of a PaaS, developers can bring their products to market faster, but they compromise on flexibility and often outgrow those platforms at some point. With Qovery developers keep full access to the power and flexibility of building on top of IaaS, can deploy into their own cloud infra accounts and all of that is as easy as working with a PaaS platform,” Dominik Tobschall from Speedinvest said in a statement.

And this is key to understanding Qovery’s unique positioning in the market. Qovery isn’t a platform-as-a-service provider. You can see your application in your AWS console directly. It doesn’t try to hide your cloud infrastructure behind a different product offering.

For instance, I could imagine small startups using Qovery and then moving to their own custom-made Terraform cloud configuration. Or companies could keep using Qovery as the team improves the product if they don’t see the needs for something else.