It’s a Mätch!

We have closed our funding round with Mätch VC.

Mätch backed us at pre-seed, before our beta was public, before we had revenue, and before we were even incorporated.

Thank you to Jan Beisswenger and the Mätch team for backing founders at the point where it actually matters.

Anyone who has raised early knows how hard it is to find someone willing to trust a team that is pre-product, pre-revenue and pre-incorporation. In Europe, that's harder still.

So we're glad there are still investors here who take real bets and back teams in their earliest days. We're convinced that this posture is what will make Europe technologically independent. Not more programs, not more paperwork. We intend to be part of that.

Mätch lives pre-seed, and does the one thing Europe needs most right now: putting money behind people willing to build ambitious tech.

Thank you for the trust. We're looking forward to returning the fund.

What we are actually building

The belief underneath all of it is simple. The way we deploy software today has become unnecessarily complex. Virtual machines, containers, orchestration layers and endless configuration are now the normal path to getting an application in front of users, and none of that is the application. Every layer consumes memory, compute and engineering attention purely to keep itself running.

We are following a different approach. That is what the rest of this blog is for.

Why Mätch

If you have not come across them, Mätch is a Stuttgart fund founded in 2023, and one of the more interesting things to happen to German early-stage capital in recent years. Their fund raised from around 70 family businesses, founders and operators rather than the usual institutional LPs.

We share our Baden-Württemberg heritage with our VC and the majority of its portfolio. It makes sense, considering we are talking about the California of Germany. Total R&D investment in Baden-Württemberg reached roughly €36.1 billion in 2023, an increase of about 19 percent on 2021 and the largest rise of any German state, and more than a quarter of all German R&D spending now happens there.

None of which guarantees anything. However, it does mean that a fund built out of this particular network is drawing on an unusually deep bench of people who have shipped hard physical and industrial technology.

Good company

We are joining a strong portfolio of startups.

ATMOS Space Cargo is building reentry capsules, which is to say they are solving the problem of getting things back down from orbit in one piece. Black Forest Labs came out of the same corner of Germany and has become one of the most internationally recognized names in generative image models. Elsewhere in the portfolio are Skycore Semiconductors, metergrid, Blockbrain and a couple of dozen others.

Joining a portfolio full of people building satellites, semiconductors and frontier models as Europe’s hyperscaler runner-up is definitely lifting our spirits. The German startup ecosystem has some catching up to do, and we are all here to deliver!

Our beta is now publicly available. It is an early beta, running in EU data centers, with a free tier: lilylabs.io.

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who backed us and believed in what we are building, and to Mätch for moving quickly and asking the right questions early.

This is just the beginning.

You build. We carry.

Start for free. Read the docs. Talk to us about migrating a workload.