MetalBear raises $12.5M in Seed funding to accelerate AI-era software testing
Israeli startup’s mirrord tool connects local code to cloud environments without deployment.
MetalBear, the Israeli startup behind the open source Kubernetes tool mirrord, has raised $12.5 million in Seed funding to address what it calls the “biggest hidden bottleneck” in modern software development: testing code in realistic cloud environments.
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The round was led by TLV Partners, with participation from TQ Ventures, MTF, Netz Capital, and angel investors including Sentry co-founder David Cramer and OpenTelemetry co-creator Ben Sigelman.
While advances in artificial intelligence now allow developers to generate code in seconds, testing that code against complex cloud-based microservices remains slow and cumbersome. Developers often rely on incomplete local mocks or wait in queues for staging environments, sometimes for days. Some enterprises spend millions of dollars on per-developer environments that still create delays.
“We’re witnessing a mismatch in modern development,” said Eyal Bukchin, MetalBear’s CTO and co-founder. “AI can now generate code in seconds, but developers still face constant friction testing it. Every small change requires another deployment cycle, another wait, another context switch. The industry has accepted this as normal, but it is actually the biggest hidden bottleneck in software development today.”
MetalBear’s answer is mirrord, a tool that lets developers connect local code directly to cloud environments with a single click. By intercepting input and output at a low level and proxying them to the cloud, mirrord allows developers to interact with databases, APIs, and message queues as if they were running their code natively in the cloud, without deployment.
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“The first time developers use mirrord, they often can’t believe what they’re seeing,” said Aviram Hassan, MetalBear’s co-founder and CEO. “They toggle a button in their IDE, hit debug, and suddenly their local code is interacting with microservices, remote databases, and third-party services. For many teams, it’s the first time they can run their code locally at all.”
The open source version has been adopted by thousands of developers at companies including NVIDIA, AWS, and Apple. Teams report 80 percent faster test iterations and 30 percent fewer production bugs. The enterprise version allows multiple developers to share a single staging environment, with traffic routing and data isolation preventing conflicts, reducing both costs and delays.
Headquartered in Israel with 25 employees across 14 countries, MetalBear plans to use the funding to expand its enterprise offering and accelerate adoption of mirrord.
