We’re excited to announce that Keel is now in private beta! Having spent the last 24 months building our platform and gathering hundreds of data points from early customers, we’re now ready to open up our waiting list for more users to try Keel for themselves.

Having worked in, run and grown multiple scale-up businesses we’ve seen first-hand the challenges of building good backend technology. Building scalable systems takes expertise, money, and lots of time, and even then you’re spending the majority of time writing boilerplate code and very little time on the areas that are actually unique to your business.

We’ve spoken to countless teams where their technology has slowed them down rather than empowering them to deliver value to their customers.

The backend-as-a-service world promises so much but at some point you hit the “BaaS brick wall” and are left facing a mammoth migration project just as the business is starting to really scale.

So we set out to build backend platform that could take us from 0 to scaling, empowering both our engineering and our operations teams.

We built Keel on two principles:

1. A backend is much more than just a database

We believe that a scalable backend platform should:

• Come complete with an integrated suite of services instead of relying on a web of different SaaS services.

• Be grounded in engineering best practices such as version control, type safety, testing, distributed tracing and event driven architecture.

• Centralise business logic into APIs rather than shipping a database client to your frontends.

• Be code first but avoid the need to write boilerplate code and instead just write that code that makes your business unique.

• Be powered by sensible, tested infrastructure that adapts based on your projects needs

2. A backend shouldn’t be an engineering black box

We’ve seen time and time again that operations is the lifeblood of any organisation. We wanted a backend that was designed to support our entire organisation from day 1.

Scaling isn’t just about infrastructure and API calls - it’s also about giving your ops team, the people on the ground, the data and tools they need to run your business. When we led the fastest growing Pharmacy in Europe (Echo, now LloydsDirect), dispatching 50k packs of medicine each day to 600k customers, we experienced first-hand the pain of scaling fast. To handle that growth, we built everything from warehouse management systems to customer service tools ourselves.

We think winning teams invest equally in internal tools and customer-facing products, but not everyone can afford that. Everyone else has to make do with cobbled-together admin tools that never get the maintenance they need, or drag-and-drop app builders that leave ops teams tearing their hair out.

With Keel you get a complete backend engine: A fully-managed relational database, flexible and customisable APIs, row- and role-based permissions, authentication, event queues, cron jobs, secret management, observability, a great local development experience, multiple environments and instant internal tools that are tightly coupled to your backend to empower your whole organisation.

Now in private beta, Keel is transforming how we think about what a backend can do - from an engineering silo to the hub of your business. We think we’ve built a product that your developers and your ops teams will love.

If you’re ready to build, ship, scale, and thrive with Keel, request an invite today. We can’t wait to have you onboard.