Clastix today announced receipt of a €2.9 million seed investment from lead investor CDP Venture Capital Sgr, and co-investors Mistral and VERTIS SGR (“Vertis Venture 6 Digital Sud” fund, partially financed by the European Union’s Next-Generation EU). It is the first external funding in the company's history, and will be used to expand its team and accelerate the growth of its Kubernetes infrastructure platform.
The investment will support product development, customer success, solutions engineering, and go-to-market expansion as Clastix grows kMetal, its commercial platform for fleet-scale Kubernetes operations. Over the next three years, the company expects to grow its headcount to support increasing customer demand and build the capabilities needed to serve enterprise teams at larger scale. Clastix will also continue to invest in Kamaji, its open-source Hosted Control Plane engine.
“The next phase of AI won't be decided by models alone but by who controls the infrastructure layer beneath them,” said Adriano Pezzuto, co-founder and CEO of Clastix. “This funding goes toward building that layer for what's coming: expanding our R&D to better support AI-scale workloads, and growing our team to bring it into new markets as they build their AI infrastructure.”
As more enterprises run Kubernetes across multiple teams, environments, and workloads, the operational burden grows quickly. Clastix helps reduce that burden by eliminating what it calls the “control plane tax” – the dedicated machines and operational complexity traditionally required for each cluster. By moving control planes to shared infrastructure, Clastix helps platform teams lower overhead, simplify operations, and scale more predictably.
“The physical AI revolution is driving demand for infrastructure that is increasingly efficient, resilient, and scalable,” said Alessandro Scortecci, Chief Investment Officer for Direct Investments at CDP Venture Capital. “Clastix's highly innovative technological approach helps organizations manage large-scale Kubernetes environments much more effectively. We are proud to support a team that combines engineering excellence, market vision, and global ambition. This investment reflects CDP Venture Capital’s commitment to backing strategic technologies developed in Italy that can strengthen Europe’s technological sovereignty and long-term competitiveness.”
Clastix's technology already runs in production with some of the most demanding infrastructure teams in Europe and North America, spanning AI labs, telecommunications, cloud services, and the public sector, giving the company a strong foundation as it expands its commercial and engineering teams.
“Clastix is the backbone of our Kubernetes infrastructure – their work on multi-tenancy and managed control planes helps us to enable our training and inference clusters at scale, with the efficiency that frontier AI demands,” said Timothée Lacroix, co-founder and CTO of Mistral. “By backing Clastix, we're investing in Europe's AI stack. A sovereign AI ecosystem isn't just about models – it's about the infrastructure layer that makes them run.”
Kamaji will remain open source and unchanged under the Apache 2.0 license, while kMetal will continue to evolve as the commercial platform for fleet management, governance, and production operations.
“Clastix is exactly the kind of deep infrastructure company we want to back through Vertis Venture 6 Digital Sud," said Renato Vannucci, Partner and Vice President of Vertis SGR. "The team's technical rigor, and its ability to already serve customers of the caliber of NVIDIA and Mistral, confirm the quality of the project. We're proud to support Clastix as it scales its platform into new markets, strengthening Europe's AI infrastructure layer from Southern Italy."