Launched in 2017, Artifakt’s mission is to make web applications agile and secure. Empowering developers, digital agencies and Enterprises alike to develop, manage, run and scale web applications, especially in the e-commerce sector. Artifakt has raised a EUR 3.7M Series A from Plug & Play, Alliance Entreprendre, Omnes Capital, and Verve Ventures. With this funding, the company will consolidate its leading position in France and continue to expand throughout Europe.

This new round, the third in 3 years, confirms the relevance and progress of Artifakt’s Platform-as-a-Service model. Amidst the current pandemic, the start-up has accelerated its growth with a 3X yearly revenue increase since its launch in 2017. Digital Transformation is booming now more than ever. The long-generalized lockdowns have nudged companies to adopt a more collaborative solution and to deploy agile web applications without having to compromise on security or scalability. Artifakt contribution to this: Reduce time-to-market, zero downtime, increase performance, better conversion rates and SEO rankings. Ultimately, making websites 100% efficient.

Moving away from the crisis and its implications, Developers and enterprises have always faced digital challenges, thanks to the ever-existing web applications complexities. Delivering features faster, improving user experience, ensuring security and operational efficiency of the infrastructure (in the event of traffic spikes or attacks) has always been an uphill task for developers. Today, Artifakt is the only solution that is built to solve all these core elements: Application development (Dev), Continuous security assessment (Sec) and Infrastructure Administration (Ops).

These challenges being the same all over the world, the startup will be able to count on its financial partners, new and old, to succeed in this internationalization, as well as on its team of digital experts scheduled to triple by the end of the year.

Why we invested in Artifakt

Today, if you’re digging into how to build, test, deploy, run, manage a webapp, this is the diversity of tools you’ll have to deal with:

Companies need to cope with an ever-increasing number of applications to develop and run your business. Coming across several frameworks (Symfony, Laravel), on several platforms (Magento, Drupal), on several softwares (Github, Bitbuck) can be a real nightmare. Deploying a webapp (meaning publishing it by putting it on a server) is expensive (5 to 10k€), time consuming and, as shown above, complicated. This is why all companies, even non pure-players, have a whole team dedicated to devops.
But building a team is not solving the whole challenge. Recruiting devops is as hard and expensive as managing webapps (kinda): Devops engineers (who code, deploy, maintain and update softwares/apps/webapps) are rare and expensive (80k€/year).
So companies are facing two pain points: shortage of devops on one hand, lack of a comprehensive tool on the other hand.

Enter Artifakt, the first automated devops-as-a service solution. The team has managed to build a beautiful, simple product that offers the IT team reliability, flexibility and simplicity. For developers, Artifakt streamlines the whole process and reduces time-to-market. Artifakt now becomes part of their daily routine, and some have admitted not imaging how they would do without it.
For enterprises, Artifakt ensures scalable, fast and flexible infrastructure that offers the best consumer experience, while handling traffic spikes. They can manage their entire apps portfolio via Artifakt, usually starting from one project and gradually deploying the rest, using it to power their entire business.

What convinced us at Verve Ventures is that Artifakt has positive feedback from both developers and enterprises (the end-users and the buyers) providing true proven ROI (return on investment) for its clients.
Customers recognize the ROI provided by Artifakt, as it has helped them increase their traffic by 30%, while reducing down-time to 0 and saving time on daily tasks (from 1 week to obtain an SSL certificate to 1 day for example).

Having built the right product is one thing, but having the right team is key:
Aymeric Aitamer, founder & CEO of Artifakt, previously was the CTO of Agence Dn’D (a specialized agency offering consulting, design and development of e-commerce websites.
There, he managed teams of 50 to 100 developers to build e-commerce websites for his retail clients. He realized that he was spending a consequent amount of his time finding tools to help them manage the project so they would be able to spend more time on the code and less on the infrastructure. Finding either a fragmented offer or tools dedicated to DevOps profiles, he decided to build the comprehensive tool his developers/client’s developers needed to produce and that his clients needed to supervise and manage their project.
The founding team was able to attract top-notch profiles, like Sébastien Lieutaud, the previous VP of Sales of Akeneo, and to surround itself by a board of advisors of numerous CTOs of tech startups and former entrepreneurs that bring experience, knowledge and network, and also validate technology developed by Artifakt.

And they’re just getting started! The roadmap is very exciting (automat billing process, Add JS based, Ruby and Java platforms, make multi-Cloud management available…) and we’re proud to accompany them in both product and international development.