The Helsinki startup, founded by Aiven’s Hannu Valtonen and Nosto’s Juha Valvanne, is betting that AI-generated code will bypass existing build pipelines.
Helsinki startup Avrea emerged from the crowd Tuesday with $4.7m in pre-seed funding led by Earlybird, pitching itself as a fast, AI-aware alternative to GitHub Actions for developer teams that have started producing code faster than their build systems can ship it.
The company was founded by Hannu Valtonen, founder of Finnish cloud data storage company Aiven (which reached a $3bn 2022 Series D valuation), and Juha Valvanne, founder of Helsinki commerce-personalization platform Nosto. Valtonen is the CEO of Avrea; Valvanne is the chief strategist.
Earlybird general partner Paul Klemm, who also spent time at Aiven before entering the investment business, led the deal.
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“Supporting Hannu for the second time was an easy decision,” Klemm said in a statement. “At Aiven, he built a category-defining infrastructure company and positioned it as a unicorn. With Juha and an experienced developer team, Avrea is uniquely positioned to define the future of software delivery.”
The product itself is a continuous integration platform that fits alongside existing GitHub Actions workflows with what Avrea describes as a single-line migration. It runs builds on high-clock speed CPUs reserved for CI work instead of shared with other tenants, and layers an AI agent on top that flags slow build steps, weak tests and outdated tools.
Avrea says the resulting pipelines run two to three times faster than equivalents hosted by GitHub and reduce infrastructure costs by up to 80%. A public benchmark on the open source terminal Ghostty showed Avrea completing builds 27 times faster than GitHub Actions, with most of that speedup coming from caching.
The framework Avrea chose to present is about what AI is doing across the engineering stack. “AI has removed the bottleneck of writing code,” Valtonen said in a statement.
“But testing and delivery still equates to output. If you’re producing five times as much code, you need to do five times as much testing, and the difficulty in CI/CD cannot be ignored.”
Valvanne argued that the next pressure point is integration, with AI agents now expected to interact with delivery systems directly rather than assigning a human to the construction phase.
That argument is consistent with what major CI vendors are seeing. Usage of GitHub Actions has grown faster than basic computing capacity in other groups, and CI runtime is one of the most frequently cited issues in the 2026 developer survey.
Whether Avrea’s answer, the fast runners and the AI visibility layer, is a category in itself or a feature that will be acquired by GitHub and competitors is an open question. Several incumbents, including Buildkite and Depot, already offer rapid CI runners; Avrea’s difference is an AI layer that highlights root causes rather than failure messages.
The company presents with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certificates already in place, an unusual position for a pre-seeded business and designed to make business acquisitions easy from day one. The Avrea team includes developers from Spotify and Hoxhunt; more than half had founded their own before.
Proceeds from the round will fund developer hires, expansion beyond CI runners, and a European market push. Avrea is already running production jobs for a small set of paying customers, the company said.
