Italy's Clastix raises €2.9 million with Mistral backing to build sovereign Kubernetes infrastructure for Europe

Clastix, a Naples-based infrastructure software company helping enterprises run Kubernetes more efficiently at scale, has raised €2.9 million in a Seed round. This marks the company’s first external funding round.

The round 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 financed by the European Union’s Next-Generation EU programme.

“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,” said Alessandro Scortecci, Chief Investment Officer for Direct Investments at CDP Venture Capital.

Founded in 2020 by Adriano Pezzuto and Dario Tranchitella, engineers who previously managed Kubernetes deployments within large enterprises, Clastix builds infrastructure software to reduce the operational overhead of running Kubernetes at scale.

Its journey began with Capsule, an open-source project that brought native multi-tenancy to Kubernetes, before the team built Kamaji, which lets tenant control planes run as pods on shared infrastructure rather than on dedicated machines, a move Clastix calls eliminating the “control plane tax”.

Since then, the company has combined the two technologies into a single enterprise offering called kMetal, the company’s commercial platform for fleet-scale Kubernetes operations. It is already running in production with infrastructure teams across AI labs, telecommunications, cloud services, and the public sector, including customers such as Fastweb, NVIDIA and Mistral.

“The next phase of AI won’t be decided by models alone but by who controls the infrastructure layer beneath them. 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,” said Adriano Pezzuto, co-founder and CEO of Clastix.

With the fresh capital, Clastix is positioning itself as a European alternative to hyperscaler-dependent infrastructure, aiming to give enterprises and AI-focused organisations hyperscaler-grade Kubernetes operations while retaining control over their own hardware and data.

Timothée Lacroix, co-founder and CTO of Mistral, said, “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.

“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.”

The capital will go toward product development, customer success, solutions engineering, and go-to-market expansion as Clastix scales kMetal. Over the next three years, the company plans to grow its headcount to meet rising customer demand and build out the capabilities needed to serve larger enterprise teams. It also plans to continue investing in Kamaji, its open-source Hosted Control Plane engine, which will remain free and unchanged under the Apache 2.0 licence.