SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct 10, 2025--
Unikraft, the first truly millisecond-native, highly scalable cloud platform, has publicly launched and announced Unikraft Cloud, an infrastructure platform purpose-built to support the complexity of AI-driven cloud workloads. The company also raised a $6 million seed round led by Heavybit, with participation from Vercel Ventures, Mango Capital, Firestreak, Fly VC, First Momentum Ventures, and a group of strategic angels. The funding marks Vercel Ventures’ first startup investment.
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Cloud economies of scale for the AI era
As AI-generated code, agents, and applications multiply, traditional cloud platforms are struggling to keep up. Always-on, resource-heavy infrastructure has become an economic bottleneck, and likely to worsen as Gartner forecasts that 50% of all cloud resources will be devoted to AI workloads in the coming years.
Unikraft was built from the ground up to address the inherent instability and significant cost of such workloads by unlocking the potential of a little-used technology called unikernels: lightweight, specialized operating system images that combine only the minimal OS components required to run a single application. By re-engineering the low-level components of cloud infrastructure to leverage the efficiency, speed, and inherently secure isolation of unikernels for production environments, Unikraft could achieve a 10-100x reduction in the cost and footprint of cloud workloads.
Developed in 2017 at NEC Laboratories Europe by computer science researchers Felipe Huici, Simon Keunzer, and Alexander Jung, the Unikraft OS project secured backing from The Linux Foundation in 2019 and formed as a corporate entity in 2022. The scientific paper about Unikraft’s technology received the prestigious EuroSys Best Paper Award in 2021.
"Legacy cloud infrastructure was never designed for the scale and unpredictability of today's AI workloads," said Felipe Huici, Unikraft's co-founder and CEO. "We've spent the better part of a decade rethinking cloud from first principles to deliver significant speed, scalability, and security gains at a fraction of the cost. It's the foundation companies need to keep pace with the next wave of AI applications."
The culmination of Unikraft’s eight years of research and development are dramatic economies of scale and cost reduction, as well as strong security advantages, achieved by the Unikraft Cloud platform:
Proven results in enterprise deployments
Unikraft has partnered with numerous companies to run their production workloads, with transformational results. Some have been able to launch new business lines that were previously the realm of imagination, while others have revamped commercial strategies or achieved exponentially better unit economics to outpace competition.
"With Unikraft, we can run over 100,000 strongly isolated PostgreSQL instances on a single machine," said Soren Bramer Schmidt, founder and CEO of Prisma. "That density is unheard of in traditional architectures and fundamentally changes the economics of the game — we’re stepping into a new infrastructure paradigm."
"With Unikraft, we successfully scaled our enterprise web agent infrastructure to handle increased demand while maintaining the reliability and performance standards our enterprise customers expect," said Shuhao Zhang, co-founder and CPO of enterprise web agent platform TinyFish. "Working with the Unikraft team has been exceptional - their expertise and responsiveness made our deployment smooth and successful."
"Choosing Unikraft to power our platform was one the best decisions we’ve made," said Alex Greaves, co-founder of cross-platform mobile app platform Flutterflow. "It’s a powerful and reliable service that supercharges our users’ experience."
Heavybit will join Unikraft’s board with this funding round, with Fly VC adding a board observer seat.
"AI is changing the speed and scale at which companies build software. Cloud infrastructure hasn't kept pace,” said Tom Drummond, founder and managing director at Heavybit. “Unikraft dramatically increases the scalability and reduces the cost of infrastructure for agents and AI workloads. We are thrilled to be partnering with talented technical founders like Felipe, Alexander, and Simon to help companies unlock their next stage of product and business growth."
"When code is generated by AI and deployed automatically, the infrastructure behind it must be radically faster and lighter," said Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel. "That's why Vercel Ventures invested in Unikraft: its cloud infrastructure technology provides exponentially higher efficiency and scalability, along with the strong isolation this new frontier demands."
About Unikraft
Unikraft is building the first truly millisecond-native, highly scalable cloud platform, designed from the ground up to handle the scope and unpredictability of modern, often AI-driven workloads. Built on a body of research backed by NEC Laboratories Europe and the Linux Foundation, Unikraft helps companies scale without limits: thousands of strongly isolated instances on single servers, millisecond cold boots, scale-to-zero, and seamless integration with existing developer tooling like Dockerfiles, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Grafana. Learn more at unikraft.com.
Displaying an instance scale to zero in Unikraft Cloud
NEW YORK (AP) — Leading Jewish groups in the United States are urging all Jewish organizations to ratchet up security measures at public events — including restrictions on access — following the deadly mass shooting that targeted a Hanukkah celebration on a popular Australian beach.
The groups — including three which specialize in security issues — said Jewish public events in the coming days should be open only to people who had been screened after preregistering.
“Provide details of location, time, and other information only upon confirmed registration,” the groups’ advisory said. “Have access control (locks and entrance procedures) to only allow known, confirmed registrants/attendees into the facility/event.”
Coinciding with this urgent appeal for increased precautions, some rabbis said their synagogues would proceed with large-scale celebrations, intended to demonstrate resilience. The mass shooting is the latest reminder of the Jewish community's longstanding reality of having to factor security into religious practice.
“This week, let us choose Jewish joy, communal strength, and courageous hope,” said a message posted by Temple Beth Sholom, one of the largest synagogues in the Miami area. "We invite every member of our family ... to join us this week as we celebrate Chanukah. Let us gather to share the warmth of the candles and reaffirm our unbreakable connection.”
Similar sentiments were expressed by Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Congregation, a survivor of the 2018 attack by an antisemitic gunman that killed 11 worshippers at the synagogue.
“Hanukkah is supposed to be a time of light, celebrating the resilience of our people,” Myers said. “In the face of antisemitism and violence, my prayer is that we don’t let the fear win but instead lean into our Jewishness and practice our tradition proudly.”
At least 15 people died in Sunday's attack, which has fueled criticism that the nation’s authorities were not doing enough to combat a surge in antisemitic crimes. On Monday, Australian leaders promised to overhaul already-tough gun control laws after the targeted attack on Sydney’s Bondi Beach
Among those killed was Eli Schlanger, assistant rabbi at Chabad of Bondi and an organizer of the family Hanukkah event, according to Chabad, an Orthodox Jewish movement that runs outreach worldwide and is known for its public menorah lightings.
Just a year earlier, according to Chabad, Schlanger had urged his fellow Jews to be uncowed in the face of rising antisemitism, voicing this message, “Be more Jewish, act more Jewish and appear more Jewish.”
Chabad.org said Chabad centers worldwide are going ahead with thousands of planned public menorah lightings and community Hanukkah celebrations “while taking greater security precautions — calling on the Jewish community to drown out hate with greater light and goodness while mourning those lost and wounded in Sydney.”
The Sydney shooting reinforced the importance of these public celebrations, said Rabbi Chaim Landa with Chabad of Greater St. Louis. The organization proceeded with its planned Sunday night menorah lighting near the Gateway Arch but with a greater police presence. He believes it is what Schlanger would have wanted.
“There’s a couple pieces to this. There’s making sure that it’s safe, and there’s also making sure that people feel safe. And we want both,” said Landa, who estimates close to 300 people attended the outdoor event in below-freezing temperatures.
“People wanted to come out, and they wanted to be together. So it’s very important that people feel that they can do that, and that’s what we want to ensure."
In a speech delivered after the Australia attack, the president of the largest branch of Judaism in North America elaborated on the mix of dismay and determination being experienced through the Jewish community.
“We are thinking about security and how to live openly and safely as Jews — asking questions that are newer to us but would have been all too familiar to generations of our ancestors,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs of the Union for Reform Judaism.
“We need to ask these hard questions. We need to be smart about security and protecting ourselves and our fellow Jews — whether within the synagogue walls, or when we walk down the street wearing a kippah,” he added. “But the spirit of the defiant Maccabees is also part of the Hanukkah story. Our Jewish community will not go into hiding. We are proud Jews and will remain so even as we make the security of our Jewish community a primary obligation.”
Jacobs referred to the Jewish tradition of placing the Hanukkah menorah in a window for others to see.
“But in the Babylonian Talmud we are taught that in a time of danger, we do not do that,” Jacobs said. “We have been living in a time of growing danger for several years now. And for too many Jews, putting a menorah in the window is too dangerous.”
Alon Shalev, a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, argued that Jews — following th attack — should be bolder in boosting their public profile.
“When Jews are attacked for being visibly Jewish, the instinct to retreat is understandable — but it is precisely the wrong response," he told The Associated Press via email.
“Jewish safety in democratic societies depends on open, shared civic affirmation, supported by political and community leaders and by fellow citizens, not on retreat behind closed doors,” he added. "Stepping into the public square and normalizing Jewish presence is how we defend ourselves.”
AP religion news editor Holly Meyer contributed to this report.
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
People look at the Menorah during the annual National Menorah Lighting in celebration of Hanukkah, on the Ellipse near the White House in Washington, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Rabbi Levi Shemtov speaks to the crowd before he lights the Menorah during the annual National Menorah Lighting in celebration of Hanukkah, on the Ellipse near the White House in Washington, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
