Unikraft announced the launch of Unikraft Cloud, a revolutionary cloud platform delivering exponential gains in scalability and efficiency — capable of running millions of strongly isolated instances on only a few servers rather than requiring an entire data center. Alongside the launch, the company revealed a $6 million seed round led by Heavybit, with participation from Vercel Ventures, Mango Capital, Firestreak Ventures, Fly VC, and First Momentum Ventures, supported by a roster of world-class angel investors.
The origins of Unikraft trace back nearly a decade, to early research in high-speed software packet processing at 10 – 40 Gb/s, which laid the groundwork for what later became the Intel DPDK framework. Subsequent work focused on achieving similar performance within virtual machines by developing lightweight, specialized operating systems dedicated to packet processing. This initiative evolved into ClickOS, a minimal, high-performance operating system based on mini-os and the Click modular router, marking a key milestone in what later became known as Network Function Virtualization (NFV).
As research expanded into virtualization, questions arose about the efficiency and scalability of traditional cloud infrastructure. Despite the undeniable power of the cloud, legacy systems required immense amounts of hardware, energy, and capital to maintain performance. The growing demand from AI-driven workloads has only amplified these inefficiencies, revealing the limits of traditional architectures.
A central challenge identified by the Unikraft team involved the excessive size of virtual machine images. Deploying gigabyte-scale images for workloads requiring only megabytes of resources led to inefficiencies and reinforced the perception of VMs as bulky and resource-intensive. Early efforts to challenge this misconception culminated in a landmark SOSP publication titled “My VM is Faster (and Safer) than your Container,” which demonstrated that VMs could achieve cold start times as low as 2 milliseconds, comparable to fork/exec performance on Linux.
The core insight behind these advancements was simple yet transformative: since cloud workloads are known at build time, general-purpose operating systems such as Linux are unnecessarily complex for specific applications. By eliminating unneeded components, a virtual machine can be tailored precisely to its workload, achieving high efficiency and strong security.
The technical concept behind such streamlined VMs is known as unikernels — small, specialized images offering fast startup, minimal size, and strong isolation. However, unikernels were historically difficult to build and deploy. To address this, the Linux Foundation Unikraft project was launched in 2018 to simplify unikernel creation, allowing developers to build efficient virtual machines without modifying applications or understanding OS internals, while maintaining full compatibility with Docker, Kubernetes, and Prometheus.