CASE 06 · KAPPA · 2023
A platform that scales past the founding team.
A seed-stage developer tools company with three engineers, shipping to ten beta customers, and a clear "Series A in six months" deadline. They needed an AWS foundation that wouldn’t embarrass them at diligence — without spending the whole runway on it.
Seed-stage developer tools
PLATFORM
2023
RESULTS
What changed, by the numbers.
ENGINEERS NEEDED
0
COLD-START DEPLOY
12m
MONTHLY SPEND
$1.4K
AUDIT POSTURE
SOC 2 R.
HOW IT WENT
The first conversation was about what NOT to build. No service mesh. No multi-region. No GitOps controller. The platform had to fit in three engineers’ heads and survive them tripling in headcount.
We built a Terraform module library — a "new service" module that bundled the EKS namespace, IAM role, ECR repo, secrets binding, Grafana dashboard, and Backstage entity in one apply. Engineers ran it from their laptops. Cold-start to production: twelve minutes including the IAM eventual consistency wait.
When the company raised their A nine months later, the diligence team called it the cleanest AWS account they’d seen at that stage. The platform now runs forty services and the team is twelve people. The Terraform module library has eight contributors and is still in the same repo.
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