European Startup Clastix Secures €2.9 Million Investment from Mistral to Develop Sovereign Kubernetes Infrastructure

Clastix Raises €2.9 Million in Seed Round Led by CDP Venture Capital Sgr

Clastix, an infrastructure software company based in Naples, has secured €2.9 million in its first external funding round. The investment was led by CDP Venture Capital Sgr, with participation from Mistral and Vertis SGR through its Vertis Venture 6 Digital Sud fund, which is partially funded by the European Union’s Next-Generation EU program.

Alessandro Scortecci, Chief Investment Officer for Direct Investments at CDP Venture Capital, expressed his confidence in Clastix, stating, “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.”

Founded in 2020 by Adriano Pezzuto and Dario Tranchitella, Clastix focuses on helping enterprises efficiently run Kubernetes at scale. The company initially launched Capsule, an open-source project that introduced native multi-tenancy to Kubernetes. They later developed Kamaji, a platform that allows tenant control planes to operate as pods on shared infrastructure, eliminating what Clastix calls the “control plane tax.”

Combining these technologies into their commercial platform, kMetal, Clastix has already attracted customers such as Fastweb, NVIDIA, and Mistral. Adriano Pezzuto, co-founder and CEO of Clastix, emphasized the importance of infrastructure in the AI industry, stating, “The next phase of AI won’t be decided by models alone but by who controls the infrastructure layer beneath them.”

With the new funding, Clastix aims to position itself as a European alternative to hyperscaler-dependent infrastructure, providing enterprises and AI-focused organizations with hyperscaler-grade Kubernetes operations while retaining control over their hardware and data.

Timothée Lacroix, co-founder and CTO of Mistral, praised Clastix for their work on multi-tenancy and managed control planes, highlighting their role in enabling training and inference clusters at scale for frontier AI demands.

The capital raised will support product development, customer success, solutions engineering, and go-to-market expansion as Clastix scales kMetal. The company plans to grow its team over the next three years to meet customer demand and enhance capabilities for larger enterprise teams. Additionally, Clastix will continue investing in Kamaji, their open-source Hosted Control Plane engine, under the Apache 2.0 license.