4.7 million dollars for Avrea

The Finnish infrastructure startup Avrea has closed a pre-seed financing round of 4.7 million US dollars. The round was led by Earlybird. The company is backed by two names from the European tech scene: Hannu Valtonen, co-founder of cloud unicorn Aiven, and Juha Valvanne, co-founder of e-commerce platform Nosto.

Avrea intends to use the fresh capital to expand its AI-native platform for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and address the growing bottleneck between AI-generated software development and its delivery.

AI writes the code, but deployment remains slow

Developers and AI agents are producing significantly more code today than just a few years ago. At the same time, existing systems for testing, validation and deployment are increasingly reaching their limits. Avrea sees this as an opportunity for its own business model.

The start-up is developing a modern CI platform that has been specially designed for the era of agent-based AI systems. According to Avrea, teams can accelerate their CI/CD pipelines by two to three times and reduce infrastructure costs by up to 80 percent.

Software delivery as the new bottleneck

While the creation of code has been massively accelerated by AI, testing and deployment processes continue to grow almost linearly with the volume of code generated.

AI has removed the bottleneck in writing code. However, testing and deployment continue to scale linearly with the output. If five times more code is created, five times more tests need to be executed

Hannu Valtonen, Co-Founder and CEO Avrea

As a result, development cycles are slowed down, build pipelines are overloaded and developers spend valuable time troubleshooting complex CI/CD processes.

Designed for developers and AI agents

Avrea focuses on full compatibility with existing workflows. Migration should be possible with a single line of code. In addition, the platform was developed in such a way that AI agents can also interact with it directly. This makes software delivery a native component of automated development processes.

In addition to faster builds, the platform offers detailed insights into pipeline performance and identifies the causes of faulty tests, blocked builds or resource problems.

Founding team with a unicorn background

The founders have experience from the European tech scene. Hannu Valtonen was co-founder of Aiven, which developed into one of the most successful European cloud infrastructure companies. Juha Valvanne previously founded the commerce platform Nosto.

The team also includes former employees from companies such as Spotify and Hoxhunt. More than half of the employees have startup experience themselves. Avrea already has security certifications such as ISO 27001 and SOC 2 at the start.

The team in particular was a decisive factor for Earlybird.

Supporting Hannu a second time was an easy decision. At Aiven, he has built a category-defining infrastructure company. At the same time, AI is currently causing an explosion in code volume, making test and deployment systems the new bottleneck.

Paul Klemm, General Partner at Earlybird

Expansion of platform and team planned

Avrea plans to use the fresh capital to expand its engineering teams, develop additional functions beyond classic CI/CD runners and accelerate international marketing.