Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow, Startup Monday is a weekly column that highlights Arlington-based startups, founders, and local tech news. Monday Properties is proudly featuring 1515 Wilson Blvd in Rosslyn.
Cosmonic, a software startup founded by a Cherrydale resident, just announced $8.5 million in seed funding.
The company provides developers with tools and services that make it easier for them to build software applications in the cloud — like Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft’s Azure — rather than building such applications in traditional data centers and then retrofitting them for the cloud.
“We are on a mission to bring back joy to the art of developing cloud-native software,” said co-founder and CEO Liam Randall in a press release.
Over the last decade, many companies have transitioned from running their software applications using in-house hardware to running them on “cloud” servers accessed via the internet. But Randall said this transition has mired software development in complexities, which has slowed down innovation.
So Cosmonic’s tools make it easier to build software applications on a “cloud-native” platform, which requires no hardware, needs 95% less coding and is more secure, he says.
Randall tells ARLnow he got the idea to found the company after he helped build this new platform while working as the vice president of innovation for Capital One in Tysons.
“Capital One was wonderful because it gave me insight into the complexities of operating thousands of applications over long periods — and we built an open-source platform called wasmCloud to help solve those,” he said.
Relying on that experience, he said in the press release that Cosmonic’s tools will change how applications are developed, deployed and managed.
“The funding will enable us to support developers working in early-stage, rapid and interactive environments — allowing them to transform applications from napkin sketch to scale in minutes,” he said in the statement. “Future releases will offer the advantages of high reliability and lower long-term software maintenance costs.”
Randall said he founded the company in 2021, adding that the name refers to how it allows companies to operate in any cloud.
“As it transcends our current method of deploying applications into a single cloud, we wanted to convey the vastness of space — Cosmonic was designed around quickly enabling secure distributed software,” he said.
Currently, the startup employs 10 people full time and has a dozen part time employees. Randall says he intends to hire more people over the next few months as the product goes to market.
Randall has worked in the D.C. area for many years. Before working at Capital One, he founded a company, Critical Stack, which he later sold to the financial firm, which is headquartered in Tysons.
When he’s not starting companies, Randall says he can be found with his wife and three kids enjoying the Custis Trail.