Startup To Watch: Nexlayer is building the tools developers need in the AI age
ATLANTA, September 3 (Hypepotamus) - I get plenty of email introductions to founders building “innovative” or “game-changing” technology.
But it’s not often that the introduction pitch calls someone’s technology “mindblowing.”
But that’s how Nexlayer was first described to me.
The Atlanta-based company is building the infrastructure to solve a growing problem in the AI coding era. The reality is that generating software has become dramatically faster. Getting that software into production and keeping it running has not.
“The complexity of creating software collapsed,” said Sal Stabler, co-founder and CEO of Nexlayer. “The complexity of operating it didn’t. The wall didn’t come down. It moved.”
Nexlayer is building for that gap. And the pitch is simple: AI builds the software. Nexlayer runs it, making it an AI-native cloud deployment platform that uses agents to move software from a code repository into a production environment.
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How Nexlayer Works
Nexlayer bills itself as a production agent that ships and runs the software created by a company’s coding agent.
A developer connects their code repository, and Nexlayer analyzes the software, determining what it needs. It can then deploy and verify that it is working. The goal is to turn working code into a running product without requiring every founder or developer to become an infrastructure expert.
For an AI-native startup, that could mean reaching production without first assembling a large infrastructure team. For an enterprise, it could mean deploying AI applications with the “isolation, controls, uptime commitments and private computing options required” for their more complex environments.
Nexlayer’s product also helps as a new application becomes more engrained in a company’s workflow.
“Nexlayer is building agents to take on more of that operational work, from detecting problems to helping applications adapt as their requirements change,” the team added. People remain in control and set the boundaries, but agents understand the code repository, create the production pipeline, deploy the application, and then verifies that it is healthy.
Meet The Team
Stabler said the co-founders are all “infrastructure guys” who have lived with this problem before at enterprise companies.
He is building Nexlayer alongside two co-founders, CTO Armond Honoré and COO Frank Honoré, PhD. Armond Honoré previously worked at Experian, ADP, The Weather Channel, ACI Worldwide and DaVita, and Frank Honoré co-founded WebLine Communications (acquired by Cisco).
Stabler, who grew up in Panama, worked as a Senior Product Manager for Watson Marketing Cloud at IBM and was a Senior Global IT Manager at Interface before co-founding a different startup in 2020.
The team was recently accepted into EWOR, a competitive tech fellowship program based in Europe.
AI in Atlanta
Stabler told Hypepotamus that building in Atlanta gives the team “proximity to major enterprise customers in industries where infrastructure, data control and sovereignty matter—financial services, healthcare, insurance, logistics, telecom and others.” He added that “those companies are not just experimenting with AI; they have to think about where workloads run, who controls the data, how systems are governed and when AI needs to stay inside private environments. That makes Atlanta a strong place to build Nexlayer.”
Maija Ehlinger
But building in Atlanta does come with tradeoffs.
“San Francisco has a much greater density of frontier AI talent and venture capital, so we have to be intentional about maintaining strong relationships there,” Stabler said. “We view the combination as an advantage: build close to enterprise customers while staying connected to the frontier AI ecosystem.”
After just launching last year, Nexlayer has already brought on hundreds of solo founders, startups, and companies as users. It has also launched LiquidBrain, its patent-pending product that provides predictable AI capacity to support private or on-premises environments.
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