It’s a Mätch!
We have closed our funding round with Mätch VC.
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. The fund size is €48 million. Notable l is where that money comes from: around 70 family businesses, founders and operators rather than the usual institutional LPs. Trumpf, Mapal Dr. Kress and Bauder are in there. So are the founders of sevDesk, Diconium and Vialytics, and people who have run things at Würth, Liebherr and Volkswagen.
Sharing our Badem Würtemberger heritage, is not only our VC, so is the majority of the portfolio. It makes sense, co nsidering 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!
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.
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.
And a very large thank you to the entire LILY team. None of this would have been possible without the people who got us here.
This is just the beginning.
You build. We carry.
Start for free. Read the docs. Talk to us about migrating a workload.