MetalBear, the company behind the open-source Kubernetes development tool mirrord, today announced it has raised $12.5 million in Seed funding. The round was led by TLV Partners with participation from TQ Ventures, MTF, Netz Capital, and angel investors including Sentry co-founder David Cramer and OpenTelemetry co-creator Ben Sigelman.
The funding will be used to solve a critical bottleneck in software development: the delay developers face when testing code in realistic cloud environments. This problem is intensifying as AI tools accelerate code generation, while testing and deployment cycles remain slow. The announcement coincides with MetalBear being named a Gartner® Cool Vendor™ in the 'Cool Vendors in Container Management' report.
In modern microservices architectures, developers struggle to test individual services within the context of the larger application. They often resort to inaccurate local mocks or wait for shared staging environments, creating significant delays.
MetalBear's tool, mirrord, allows developers to connect their local code directly to a remote cloud environment. It works by intercepting a service's input/output on the local machine and proxying it to the cloud, enabling interaction with remote databases, APIs, and message queues without deploying any code.
"AI can generate code in seconds, but developers still face significant friction testing it," said Eyal Bukchin, CTO and co-founder of MetalBear. "Every small change requires a new deployment cycle, leading to constant context switching. This stop-and-start process is a major bottleneck in modern development."
The open-source version of mirrord is used by developers at companies including NVIDIA, AWS, and Apple, with teams reporting up to 80% faster test iterations. A paid version of the product uses traffic routing and queue splitting to allow multiple developers to work on a single environment simultaneously without conflict.
"As AI makes developers write code faster, testing and integration become the critical bottlenecks," said Brian Sack, Partner at TLV Partners. "When every AI agent needs its own test environment, traditional approaches become completely unscalable. mirrord's architecture is uniquely positioned for this new era of development."
The founding team's background in cybersecurity informed mirrord's architecture, which operates without requiring cluster modifications and is designed to handle complex enterprise settings like service meshes and air-gapped environments.
