Clastix raises €2.9M Seed to build sovereign Kubernetes infrastructure for Europe's AI stack

Clastix (Naples) has raised €2.9 million in a Seed round led by CDP Venture Capital Sgr, with Mistral as a strategic co-investor and Vertis SGR (via its Vertis Venture 6 Digital Sud vehicle, partially financed by EU NextGen EU funds) participating. Founded in 2020 by Adriano Pezzuto (CEO) and Dario Tranchitella, the company builds open-source and commercial Kubernetes control-plane infrastructure. This is the company's first external financing.

Clastix operates three products: Capsule (open-source multi-tenancy for Kubernetes), Kamaji (open-source hosted Kubernetes control planes, Apache 2.0 licensed), and kMetal, the commercial enterprise platform. Production clients include Fastweb, NVIDIA, and Mistral.

What Kamaji actually solves

Kubernetes control planes are the core management components of a cluster — they schedule workloads, handle authentication, and maintain cluster state. Running them conventionally requires dedicated virtual machines: one per cluster, which compounds costs as an organisation's infrastructure scales. Kamaji replaces dedicated VMs with lightweight pods that run multiple control planes on shared infrastructure. For Fastweb, one of Italy's largest network operators, the reduction was sufficient to adopt Kamaji for its multi-tenant cloud. NVIDIA and Mistral use it for AI workload infrastructure.

Timothée Lacroix, CTO of Mistral, was explicit: "Clastix is the backbone of our Kubernetes infrastructure. 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."

Pezzuto frames the sector-level stakes: "The next phase of AI won't be decided by models alone but by who controls the infrastructure layer beneath them. Europe needs companies that can make that infrastructure sovereign, secure and scalable."

Open-source to commercial

The round funds two parallel tracks: keeping Kamaji growing as a free project, and building commercial traction through kMetal. This is a standard open-core path, with the specific advantage that the free tier already has three significant production users who have validated the product at scale.

CDP Venture Capital Sgr — Italy's state-backed deep-tech investor — leading the round is consistent with the European sovereign AI framing. Vertis SGR's Digital Sud vehicle, which draws on EU recovery funds, adds a regional dimension: Naples as a node in Italy's effort to build technical infrastructure outside Milan.

The 18-month test is conversion: whether Fastweb, NVIDIA, and Mistral graduate to kMetal contracts, and whether Clastix can add enterprise clients in regulated sectors — financial services, healthcare, public sector — where data sovereignty requirements make paying for a commercial tier the path of least resistance.