Lekko Closes $4.5 Million Seed Round, Launches Out of Stealth to Help Developers Move Beyond Feature Flags
Lekko, the company changing the way developers build software through dynamic configuration, today launches out of stealth with $4.5 Million in seed funding led by Addition and LUX Capital with participation from BoxGroup, SV Angel, and Abstraction Capital. Angel investors include Thomas Chen, Former CTO of Supaglue and creator of Flipr at Uber; Julianna Lamb, CTO of Stytch; Peter Edge, CEO of Buf Technologies; and other industry leaders.
Going beyond feature flags, Lekko is pioneering the concept of a “lekko” — a Polish adjective that means “light and easy” – which is a tunable aspect of a software product such as test code, a premium feature, or a regionally allowed service. Lekko gives developers the power to deploy multiple configurations, features, previews, tiers, and experiments directly within their code, unlike feature flags which must be hosted by a third party. This enables businesses to safely deploy updates, staged rollouts, and quick rollbacks through their existing CI/CD pipelines.
“Lekko is the only commercial dynamic configuration tool on the market,” said Konrad Niemiec, CEO and Founder of Lekko. “Over 50% of outages and security breaches are caused by misconfigurations – it needs to be easier for developers to make changes quickly and safely in production. We’re on a mission to universalize the concept of dynamic configuration like we saw practiced internally at companies like Uber and Facebook.”
Despite advances in cloud computing, containerization, serverless, and continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), modifying software that has already been deployed to the cloud is a painful and cumbersome process. Even minor changes require hotfixes, rollbacks, or manual database updates. The primary approach to this problem is what’s known in the industry as
“feature flagging” which leaves the codebase littered with technical debt, slips untested code to customers, increases external dependencies, and contributes to outages.
Recent outages caused by misconfigurations
- Google Cloud, by accidentally leaving one input parameter blank, wiped out the entire account and all backups of UniSuper, an Australian pension fund with 647,000 members and $135 billion in managed funds.
- AT&T experienced a network-wide outage caused by a configuration error that caused $350 million of customer restitution fees and bold headlines calling them to task for dropping 5,000 911 calls.
- McDonald’s suffered a worldwide IT outage caused by a misconfiguration from a third-party vendor which cost the company $62 million in revenue.
Lekko’s dynamic configurations can be applied in real time through existing workflows, enabling developers to make changes in seconds without rebuilding or re-shipping a release. Lekko customers will be able to migrate seamlessly from existing feature flagging tools. The solution also comes equipped with native observability and AI-assisted workflows to keep code clean and help teams avoid dangerous configurations, as well as granular permissions controls that empower platform teams to specify who can roll out specific configurations and features to select customers.
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