MetalBear’s solution, mirrord, enables developers to test code instantly in production-like environments, addressing critical inefficiencies as AI accelerates code generation
MetalBear, creator of the popular open source Kubernetes development solution mirrord, announced today it has raised $12.5 million in Seed funding. The round was led by TLV Partners with the participation of TQ Ventures, MTF, and Netz Capital, as well as prominent angel investors including David Cramer, co-founder of Sentry, and Ben Sigelman, co-creator of OpenTelemetry. The funding comes as enterprises struggle with a paradox: while AI dramatically accelerates code creation, developers still waste valuable time waiting to test their code in realistic cloud environments. The funding announcement coincides with MetalBear being named a Gartner Cool Vendor in the ‘Cool Vendors™ in Container Management’ report.
The microservices architecture has transformed how modern software is built, with enterprises managing hundreds or thousands of interconnected services. Yet this evolution has created a critical bottleneck: developers working on a single service cannot effectively test their code within the context of the larger application. They resort to incomplete local testing with mocks that don’t reflect real cloud conditions, then queue for hours or days to access shared staging environments. Some organizations spend millions annually on per-developer cloud environments, only to find these still require deployment cycles and shift maintenance burdens onto individual developers, creating yet more bottlenecks.
“We’re witnessing a mismatch in modern development,” said Eyal Bukchin, CTO and co-founder of MetalBear. “AI can now generate code in seconds, but developers still face constant friction testing it. Every small change requires another deployment cycle, another wait, another context switch. These interruptions compound throughout the day, turning what should be rapid iteration into a stop-and-start marathon. The entire industry has accepted this as normal, but it’s actually the biggest hidden bottleneck in software development today.”
MetalBear’s mirrord fundamentally changes how development teams work with cloud-native applications. With a single click, developers can connect their local code to their cloud environment, instantly accessing all its databases, APIs, queues, and services without deploying anything. The solution works by injecting itself into the local development process and intercepting all input/output operations at a low level, seamlessly proxying them to the remote environment.
“The first time developers use mirrord, they often can’t believe what they’re seeing,” said Aviram Hassan, CEO and co-founder of MetalBear. “They toggle a button in their IDE, hit debug, and suddenly their local code is interacting with other microservices, remote databases, message queues, and third-party services as if it were running in the cloud. We’ve even seen teams where mirrord lets them run their code locally for the first time. Before, there were just too many dependencies to run locally, so all they could do was deploy and hope.”
The company’s open source solution has been adopted by thousands of developers across major technology companies, including NVIDIA, AWS, and Apple, with teams reporting 80% faster test iterations and 30% fewer production bugs. The solution’s paid version enables multiple developers to work simultaneously on the same environment without conflicts, using traffic routing and queue splitting to ensure each developer only receives the data meant for their specific tests. This allows entire teams to share a single staging environment as if each developer had their own, eliminating both bottlenecks and costs.
“There’s intense focus on AI and developer productivity right now, but most solutions only address code generation,” said Brian Sack, Partner at TLV Partners. “As AI makes developers write code faster, testing and integration become the critical bottlenecks. When every AI agent needs their own test environment, traditional approaches become completely unscalable. mirrord’s architecture is uniquely positioned to enable this new era of development.”
mirrord’s approach leverages deep system-level expertise rarely seen in the DevOps space. The founding team has a deep expertise in cybersecurity, most recently as a core part of the leadership at BioCatch where they built behavioral analytics systems. This knowledge enabled them to create a solution that handles the complexity of enterprise environments, from air-gapped clusters to complex service meshes, without requiring cluster modifications or extensive setup.
Credit: Omer Hacohen
