Without scalable infrastructure, growing companies fail. Historically, the hardest part of managing infrastructure hasn’t been getting started; platform as a service (PaaS) products have given cloud-based, on demand environments for developing and deploying applications without any of the complexity of maintaining the server, storage or networking layers. But PaaS users consistently outgrow what worked at the beginning as scalability and reliability become larger priorities, resulting in a forced migration at the exact wrong time.

For a long time, this tradeoff was clear. Start on a PaaS like Heroku (or many of its more current inspirations), and eventually outgrow it and painfully migrate to a hyperscaler, spinning up valuable time and resources for the sake of maturity. 

That’s why we’re so excited to have led Porter’s Series A. Porter makes it effortless to have scalable infrastructure from day one that can last forever. 

What Porter Does Differently

Porter was built to make infrastructure something startups don’t have to relearn as they scale. Porter delivers a full PaaS experience inside the customer’s own cloud account. Instead of abstracting infra away within a black box, Porter runs directly in AWS, GCP, or Azure, giving companies the ergonomics of a PaaS with the control, security and economics of cloud infra. This single architectural decision has changed the paradigm of infrastructure – no painful migrations, built in compliance from day one, support for GPU workloads, and infra that grows with the business, not against it, all without needing to hire a devops team. 

Why We’re Excited Now: Vibe Code Your App If You Must, Not Your Prod Infra

Today, three shifts are colliding:

1. AI has massively accelerated how quickly startups hit real infrastructure complexity (higher baseline reliability, spiky demand, long-running jobs, data gravity)
2. AI has created a shift in founder demographics that no longer carry the tribal knowledge of how to manage cloud infra (kubernetes, load balances, storage tradeoffs, VPCs, autoscaling, rollouts / rollbacks, the list goes on…)
3. Founders are jumping straight into the cloud and using AI to generate Terraform modules, IAM policies, and deployment configs, which can lead to a litany of catastrophes that would be a CTO or CISO’s worst nightmare

Today, Porter supports companies ranging from YC startups to post-IPO and $1bn+ revenue businesses. Many of these companies started on Porter and have never left. Within YC, Porter is a top-five all time most popular dev tool, with burgeoning companies like Tennr, ModelML, Outtake, and Giga standardizing on the platform. We at FirstMark are especially excited to be partnering with the foundational infrastructure for a meaningful share of the fastest growing AI startups, and couldn’t imagine a better founder / CEO at the helm than Justin Rhee, who’s one of the most incisive product thinkers and first principles operators we’ve come across. 

What Comes Next

We believe application infrastructure is one of the largest opportunities in software, and Porter is emerging as the default starting point for a new generation of companies. Their product roadmap is endless and we couldn’t be more excited to be on the journey with Justin and team.