Hyphen AI, a new Seattle-based startup using generative AI to help developers deploy cloud applications, raised $5 million in a seed round led by Unlock Venture Partners.
The company’s product, Hyphen Deploy, aims to make cloud infrastructure setup as simple as describing what an app should do.
The product automates complex DevOps processes — replacing YAML files, Dockerfiles, and Terraform modules with natural language prompts and business rules. Developers can describe service goals such as latency, scale, or compliance, and the platform automatically generates production-ready cloud infrastructure across providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and Cloudflare.
“Today infrastructure automation typically takes weeks to setup and configure and then monthly maintenance on those configurations — Deploy reduces it to minutes,” Jared Wray, CEO and founder at Hyphen AI, said in a statement.
Wray previously founded Tier 3, a Seattle-area enterprise cloud startup acquired by CenturyLink (now Lumen Technologies) in 2013. He spent two years as an exec at CenturyLink and was later CTO at streaming company iStreamPlanet and clean tech startup Palmetto.
Hyphen joins a growing number of startups using generative AI to automate infrastructure work, including fellow Seattle startup Pulumi.
Unlock Ventures partner Andy Liu, who is based in Seattle, said the market “desperately needs” a “truly developer-first operations platform.”
“Deploy returns software development to the promise of developers leading the way with no infrastructure overhead, just focus on code,” Liu said in a statement.
Wray declined to disclose the company’s revenue metrics. He said customers have been using the platform for the past five months. Hyphen employs 10 people, including Jim Newkirk, who is serving as a fractional COO and was also an exec at CenturyLink and Tier3.
