LocalStack journey began with a simple yet radical idea: developers should be able to run complete AWS environments on their local machines. Today’s developers are heroes in a high-stakes battle against the clock. Every hour spent waiting for cloud-based tests to run is an hour they could be innovating.
Over the past years LocalStack has become the de facto platform for local cloud development, embraced by a global community of developers looking to streamline their workflows and reduce cloud dependencies. The flexibility to develop and test locally empowers teams to operate at their full potential. With 8 million weekly sessions, 280 million Docker pulls, and over 900 paying customers - LocalStack is changing how the world develops cloud applications.
LocalStack was founded by Gerta Sheganaku (COO and Co-CEO), Waldemar Hummer (CTO and Co-CEO) and Thomas Rausch (Head of Engineering). Sheganaku and Hummer are based in Zurich as well as other team members. The Swiss LocalStack GmbH is legally an affiliate of StackLift Inc., a Delaware company.
Empowering Enterprises to Build at Speed
Enterprises today face mounting pressure to innovate rapidly while controlling costs and maintaining product reliability. LocalStack addresses these challenges by enabling development teams to run complete AWS environments locally, which significantly speeds up development and testing cycles.
The result? LocalStack team has seen deployment times reduced from 28 minutes in the cloud to just 24 seconds locally for some workloads. This capability fundamentally transforms development workflows, allowing teams to iterate quickly and deliver high-quality software without being held back by cloud constraints.
Companies such as SiriusXM and Chime are among many customers that trust LocalStack to enhance their development processes. LocalStack platform not only optimizes speed but also provides cost efficiencies and better developer autonomy, ensuring that enterprises stay ahead in a fast-evolving digital landscape.
A Thriving Community, Driving Innovation
LocalStack's open-source origins and commitment to the developer community have been central to its growth. With 56,000 GitHub stars, 25,000 Slack members, and 500+ contributors, the venture has built an active community that resonates with its mission and is as passionate about LocalStack as its team.
This strong foundation has been pivotal in helping the company stay true to its developer-first approach, ensuring that its platform evolves to meet real-world development challenges and that it can quickly adapt to the complex needs of enterprise-scale development teams, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
Going beyond AWS
The Series A round was led by Notable Capital, with participation from existing investors CRV and Heavybit. This funding opens up new opportunities for expanding LocalStack’s capabilities and going beyond AWS. Recent previews for Snowflake and its roadmap for an Azure emulator position the startup to support multi-cloud strategies - a critical focus for modern enterprises. Expanding beyond AWS will strengthen LocalStack’s role as the de-facto platform for local cloud development and will enable new use cases like developing cross-cloud integrations, or testing cloud migrations where workloads get moved from one platform to another.
The team is also doubling down on advanced features around developer experience (DevX), team collaboration, and deep application insights. A big focus of its work is to enable use cases that are hard or impossible to achieve in the real cloud - for example, snapshotting and restoring the full state of a cloud app, or inspecting the messages of an event-based application and re-playing individual events for debugging, or simulating an outage of an entire cloud region to test application resilience.
The team envisions a world where developers can test application functionality, security, and resilience, play with chaos engineering, and prepare for every scenario—all within LocalStack.
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