Over the past two years, Egypt-born Stakpak has been quietly building an AI-powered DevOps platform to simplify infrastructure management for developers.
Founder and CEO George Fahmy began working on the startup after seeing first-hand how difficult DevOps can be while working with software companies in Europe and the US during his first year of college.
“At every single company I worked at, infrastructure work was a chore because it’s something developers have to deal with, and only a tiny percentage can do this type of work full-time,” Fahmy shared with Techpoint Africa. “Very few developers know how to ensure infrastructure is secure and is able to scale with increased customer demand, and this gets in the way of every developer’s work.”
Fahmy began working on Stakpak in 2021 but decided to go full-time in 2022 shortly before the release of ChatGPT. After seeing large language models (LLMs) help in writing code, the team began experimenting with them for DevOps-related tasks, and Fahmy says it now sees state-of-the-art performance from it.
The startup, which announced a $500,000 pre-seed round today, says it can significantly slash the time that developers spend on infrastructure-related tasks.
P1 Ventures led the round, while Digital Currency Group, 500 Sanabil, and the co-founders of Instabug, a developer tools startup, Moataz Soliman and Omar Gabr, completed the lineup.
“We’ve been impressed by George’s vision for Stakpak and inspired by the quality of his product and his relentless speed of execution, despite the limited resources. We believe his domain expertise as an early engineer in the US, Europe, and the Middle East uniquely positions him to build a global business,” Mikael Hajjar, Co-founder and Managing Partner at P1 Ventures, said.
Stakpak’s AI-powered DevOps agent can execute in 50 minutes tasks that would typically take a developer four hours. The company initially charged customers per seat but has since pivoted to a pay-per-request model, allowing companies to integrate Stakpak’s APIs and even build internal tools on top of its platform.
The funding will help the startup grow its team across the US and Egypt. With a focus on the American market, Stakpak has its business and operations team working out of the US while its engineering and product teams work out of Egypt.
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Fahmy notes that this split was necessary because of the startup’s target market. With a large tech industry, Fahmy believes that winning the US market is key to the startup’s success.
“Big logos help you sell better,” he noted.
However, he’s also keen to build a globally competitive technology company out of Africa, hence the decision to keep the engineering team in Egypt.
Early customers appear to be impressed by the startup’s solution, with Rami Elsawy, CTO of CheckFirst AI, saying the company was “blown away by how Stakpak helped us streamline our infrastructure setup.”
In two years, Fahmy says his biggest challenge has been finding African B2B growth talents with experience selling developer tools.
“There are a lot of great engineers and researchers, but not a lot of people that know how to sell this product,” he said.
Stakpak operates with a lean team of four full-time employees and three part-time staff. The company’s primary goal for the year is to reach $100,000 in annual revenue.
With DevOps automation a critical need for companies worldwide, Stakpak is betting that its AI-powered solution can help businesses save time and costs.
