From Deimos To DevOps: SA Founder Bags USD 3.7 M For Next Big Bet, Salus Cloud

Salus Cloud, a South African startup aiming to become the go-to DevOps platform for Africa’s developers, has raised USD 3.7 M in seed funding to accelerate product development and scale its presence across the continent.

The round was co-led by Atlantica Ventures and P1 Ventures, with backing from LoftyInc’s Idris Bello, Everywhere Ventures, and Essence VC’s Timothy Chen.

Built by Andrew Mori, also the founder of Deimos (one of Google Cloud’s largest partners in Africa), Salus Cloud wants to solve a stubborn but overlooked pain point in the continent’s tech stack: secure, scalable, affordable DevOps.

As more startups emerge across Africa, many are forced to either jury-rig insecure manual deployments or overpay for CI/CD tools built for Silicon Valley scale and pricing, neither of which suits the lean realities of African tech companies.

Salus Cloud offers an AI-native, developer-first platform that automates security fixes, simplifies software delivery, and packages it all at a price startups can actually afford.

Its self-service tier starts at USD 9.00 per developer, while its enterprise package, at USD 5 K per month, is pitched as cheaper than hiring one DevOps engineer in Lagos or Nairobi. Five enterprise clients are already onboard, with fintechs leading the early charge.

But the startup aims to go beyond cost-cutting, its founder emphasises, as the goal is to give African startups the infrastructure to move fast without breaking things, or budgets.

Mori says the goal is to support 50–500 enterprise teams and tens of thousands of developers by 2026. And unlike many imported tools, Salus is purpose-built for the continent’s realities, where connectivity is patchy, teams are small, and every dollar spent on tooling must show ROI.

This funding signals a broader shift in how investors are thinking about Africa’s tech ecosystem. The boom in startups is creating downstream demand for infrastructure: dev tools, cloud platforms, and scalable workflows that can handle hypergrowth without burning capital. Salus Cloud sits squarely in that opportunity space.