Lekko - a Polish adjective that means "light and easy" - has just launched out of stealth with $4.5 Million in funding from investors Addition and LUX Capital. The company was founded by CEO Konrad Niemiec, who was an engineer at Uber before realizing there was a real need in the market to give developers the power to deploy multiple configurations, features, previews, tiers, and experiments directly within their code.

The company is positioning dynamic configuration as the ability to have a tunable piece of software that can be adjusted on the fly in production. According to the company, this goes well beyond feature management, which argues that in a perfect world, feature flagging wouldn't even be necessary in the first place.

"Over 50% of outages and security breaches are caused by misconfigurations - it needs to be easier for developers to make changes quickly and safely in production," said Niemiec.

The internal tool at Uber to handle dynamic configuration was called Flipr, which Niemiec got to leverage first-hand as an engineer on the self-driving team. "Without Flipr I'm not sure Uber would have been able to scale to over 10,000 cities as quickly as it did," said Niemiec. Worth noting that the creator of Flipr, Thomas Chen, is also an investor at Lekko.

Facebook (Meta) has published papers about dynamic configuration that go back over a decade. Other companies known for their dynamic configuration tooling are LinkedIn, Plaid, and Doordash. But according to Niemiec, Lekko is the first and only commercial dynamic configuration tool on the market. What this means in practice is that dynamic configuration is now available to any company looking to move beyond feature flags - not just FAANG companies with engineering-heavy resources.

There are consistent headlines about outages caused by misconfigurations - recently, AT&T's nationwide outage caused $350 million of customer restitution fees and McDonald's worldwide IT outage which cost the company $62 million in revenue. But it's too early to say if dynamic configuration is the ultimate solution. But with engineers from Uber, Meta, and Splunk working together on the problem - it seems like Lekko is certainly worth keeping an eye on