Aiven co-founder Hannu Valtonen’s Avrea emerges from stealth with €4 million to build AI-native CI/CD platform

Avrea, a Helsinki-based startup offering an AI-native CI/CD platform built for the new era of development, today announced that it has emerged from stealth and has raised €4 million ($4.7 million) in total pre-Seed funding led by Earlybird.

Avrea was founded by Hannu Valtonen, co-founder of Finnish unicorn Aiven, and Juha Valvanne, co-founder of Nosto. 

Earlybird General Partner Paul Klemm commented, “Backing Hannu a second time was an easy decision. At Aiven, he built a category-defining infrastructure company and scaled it to unicorn status. But what makes Avrea especially compelling is the opportunity: AI is driving an explosion in code, and the systems that test and ship software are quickly becoming the bottleneck. With Juha and a team deeply experienced in building for developers, Avrea is uniquely positioned to define the future of software delivery.”

The company states that as AI tools produce more and more code, software development is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. However, the systems used for testing, validating, and deploying that code were designed for a slower time. The Finnish startup notes that this widening gap between how quickly code is created and how quickly it can be tested and shipped has become a major bottleneck in modern engineering and a daily drag on developer productivity.

Avrea’s mission is to help builders ship software faster, more often, and with higher quality. Avrea claims to rebuild the software delivery layer from the ground up for the AI era. Fully compatible with existing CI/CD workflows, teams can adopt Avrea with a single line of code. Avrea can also be directly accessed by AI agents, becoming a native part of how code is built, tested, and shipped.

The company offers speed and full observability into pipeline performance, surfacing the root causes of flaky tests, stuck builds, and resource issues that traditional systems mask behind unclear failures.

Hannu Valtonen, co-founder and CEO of Avrea, said, “AI has removed the bottleneck of writing code. But testing and delivery still scale linearly with output. If you generate five times more code, you need to run five times more tests, and the strain on CI/CD becomes impossible to ignore. Avrea removes that friction without requiring teams to change their workflows.”

The Avrea team has developed a production-grade platform from the ground up, launching with enterprise-grade security certifications, including ISO 27001 and SOC 2.

Juha Valvanne, co-founder and CSO of Avrea, added, “We have entered a new era where software is built and shipped in collaboration with AI. As AI agents become part of the development process, they should be able to directly interact with delivery systems. Avrea is designed for this new reality: to make shipping software feel effortless, so builders can focus on creating value instead of fighting their tools.”

The company plans to use this new capital to scale the engineering team, expand the platform beyond CI/CD runners, and accelerate go-to-market as Avrea builds the foundation for the next generation of software delivery.

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