Six years ago, Keith Horwood was known in his native Toronto as a former graduate student who’d hacked into his school’s student union election site, changing candidates’ titles for comic effect. (He was given what’s called a conditional discharge after paying a fine and performing community service.)
He also determined that he’d rather become known in tech circles as an agent for good, and he seems to be working toward that end with StdLib, his roughly two-year-old startup that abstracts away infrastructure using “serverless” architecture, allowing developers to write everything from simple functions to complex business logic, then deploy their code as scalable, fully documented web APIs.
The idea: delivering web services and APIs is a complex problem, and plenty can go wrong between the birth of a business idea and the production implementation of a web service. StdLib is aiming to solve the problem by making it possible to deploy new updates that are uncoupled from a company’s infrastructure. (This way, if things go awry with that new function or update, users and customers needn’t know.)
The company has plenty of competition. Still, investors must think it has a chance at fighting through a growing field of upstarts.
StdLib first passed through the accelerator program AngelPad early last year; today, it’s announcing another $2 million in fresh seed funding led by BlueYard Capital, a Berlin- based venture firm focused largely on the democratization of software development.
Other investors in the round include Joe Montana’s Liquid 2 Ventures; Aston Motes, who was Dropbox’s first engineer; Michael Dabrowski, president of the biotechnology company Synthego; and the Nordic Makers Venture Group.
