Developer tool company MetalBear secures $12.5 million in funding, allowing programmers to test their local code in real-world cloud environments immediately.
MetalBear, a pioneering technology company based in Tel Aviv, has announced the successful completion of a $12.5 million Seed funding round. The funding was led by TLV Partners, with participation from TQ Ventures, MTF, Netz Capital, and several prominent angel investors, as well as PPP Capital and Rustic Canyon.
The funding round underscores the growing importance of MetalBear's solution in addressing a significant challenge in modern software development: the gap between local coding and real-world testing.
Simplifying Complex Development Workflows
Modern applications are intricate webs of microservices, third-party APIs, message queues, and distributed databases. This complexity makes testing a daunting task for developers. MetalBear's solution offers a seamless way for developers to run code locally while connecting to live iCloud environments, thereby simplifying these complex workflows.
Improved Efficiency and Reliability
Adopters of MetalBear's technology have reported substantial improvements. Some teams have cut test iteration times by as much as 80 percent, and reduced production bugs by nearly a third. These efficiencies are a result of developers being able to interact with databases, APIs, and microservices as though their code were already deployed, without the time-consuming build and deploy process.
A Shift in Developer Productivity
The definition of developer productivity is evolving, focusing on how quickly engineers can validate that code with confidence, rather than just how quickly they can write code. MetalBear's platform offers additional capabilities for large teams, making it practical for enterprise use.
Enhanced Security Measures
As local code interacts directly with sensitive systems, it's crucial for organizations to enforce stronger guardrails, clearer access policies, and more sophisticated monitoring. MetalBear's technology includes built-in guardrails to prevent dangerous side effects, helping teams keep control over what local code can and cannot do.
Traffic Routing and Queue Splitting
To ensure multiple developers working on the same environment don't conflict with one another, MetalBear's platform features traffic routing and queue splitting. This means that each developer can work independently, without fear of affecting others' work.
The Future of Software Development
With MetalBear's technology, the line between "local" and "staging" will blur as more teams adopt instant iCloud-connected testing. Developers will expect real-time validation of their work against live systems. Infrastructure strategies may shift towards consolidating into fewer shared environments supported by intelligent routing and isolation, reducing cost and complexity but requiring careful management to avoid conflicts or unintended side effects.
Investors see MetalBear's approach as a timely solution to this imbalance, enabling faster iteration cycles, more reliable software, and lower infrastructure costs. As AI accelerates the pace of code creation, the bottleneck has moved downstream to testing, integrating, and deploying. MetalBear's technology is poised to lead this evolution, bringing the iCloud environment directly to the developer's machine, intercepting low-level input/output operations in local code and proxying them into the remote environment.
