AI-powered Funding Alert YC

Y Combinator backs AI infra startup Shuttle in $6m round

• ByStartupStory     |    November 1, 2025

Y Combinator Backs AI Infrastructure Startup Shuttle in $6 Million Seed Round

Shuttle, an AI-driven cloud infrastructure startup focused on simplifying backend development for developers, has raised $6 million in a seed funding round led by Y Combinator. The investment marks a significant milestone for the London-based company, which aims to revolutionize how developers build and deploy applications by making infrastructure seamless and automated.

Founded in 2019 by Nodar Daneliya, a former Google engineer and quant hedge fund manager, Shuttle provides a zero-configuration platform enabling developers to deploy Rust backends in minutes. The startup has attracted over 20,000 developers and facilitated more than 130,000 deployments with a developer-friendly experience often described as the “Vercel for backends.”

Shuttle’s mission is timely as AI-powered coding tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor accelerate code generation but infrastructure setup remains a bottleneck. Shuttle bridges this gap by pairing code with automated cloud infrastructure provisioning, allowing developers to focus on product innovation rather than complex deployment logistics.

The new funding will help Shuttle expand its zero-config infrastructure experience beyond Rust to all programming languages and integrate deeply with AI coding workflows. The company plans to build an AI-powered platform engineer capable of managing cloud resources, provisioning databases, and handling service connections through natural language prompts—making cloud deployment as easy as writing code.

Notable investors in the round include Y Combinator, Global Founders Capital, former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, Segment founder Calvin French-Owen, and senior leaders from OpenAI and other top tech companies. Thomas Dohmke commented, “Deploying and running applications as fast as creating them is the next major frontier, and Shuttle is uniquely positioned to lead this space.”

Shuttle’s vision aligns with the expanding definition of developers to include non-traditional coders who benefit from simple, automated infrastructure solutions. By removing deployment friction and supporting major cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud, Shuttle aims to become the go-to cloud backend platform for AI-assisted development globally.

With this capital raise, Shuttle is poised to accelerate product development and scale its active community, reinforcing its role at the intersection of AI, developer tools, and cloud infrastructure.

In summary, Y Combinator’s $6 million backing for Shuttle highlights growing investor confidence in infrastructure startups that enable rapid AI-driven software development. Shuttle’s innovative platform addresses a critical pain point in the modern development lifecycle, setting the stage for broader adoption as AI continues to reshape software engineering practices internationally.

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