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Atomized, an early stage startup that wants to create a modern tool to help developers deploy infrastructure faster, announced the first step of its funding journey today, a $500,000 pre-seed round from Zing Capital, Y Combinator and several unnamed angels.

Company co-founder and CEO Nik Kotov says developers are spending over 20% of their time on setting up the necessary infrastructure just to run their applications, and he and his co-founder and CTO Eddie Herbert believed there had to be a better way, so like all good entrepreneurs, they built one.

“With Atomized our goal is to provide a platform that allows developers to deploy their applications really quickly. And the way it literally works is that we plug into where your code lives in GitHub, and also plug into your cloud provider, so currently it’s AWS, and we automatically spin up all the necessary infrastructure for you” Kotov told me.

For now, that means spinning up containers, databases and static sites on AWS, but there are plans to expand that to work across multiple clouds over time as the company develops. “Our [goal] is actually to abstract away all those choices, all those nitty gritty details of Amazon, Azure and GCP and essentially provide you the easiest most straightforward solution,” he said.

Kotov actually went through Y Combinator last summer as a solo founder, but he was trying to build a different product at that time dealing with compliance infrastructure. He ended up pivoting to this solution and joining forces with Herbert after Demo Day, but says the experience was well worth his time, even if he ended up with a different approach after all was said and done.

“YC opened up a huge door for me as someone who does not have any connections to Silicon Valley whatsoever. […] Being an immigrant and not coming from a rich family […], all of a sudden I got access to a bunch of people that I previously had no access to,” he said.

Both founders are immigrants with Kotov hailing from Russia and Herbert from Estonia. They are both based in Charlotte, North Carolina, which Kotov says is a hidden gem for diverse technical talent.

“I think Charlotte is kind of the best place to [build a startup] because in general Charlotte is very diverse, which a lot people don’t know. It’s 50% white and the rest are Black or Latino. It’s kind of awesome because we can hire the best people and then have diversity also built into into the company as well,” he said.

The product is in Beta right now with 60 customers running on the platform. The plan is to use the money judiciously to begin to hire some more people. Right now in addition to the two founders, they have two full time engineers.