Will Stewart

Will Stewart is co-founder and CEO of Northflank, a company founded in London, England, in early 2019 that runs apps, databases, jobs, GPUs, and microVM sandboxes for AI agents, either in its own cloud or inside a customer's cloud account.

Hosting Game Servers in Lincoln, England

Stewart started out in Lincoln, a small city in the north of England that he described on Software Engineering Daily as having little software engineering history. At school he deployed game servers as side projects, and at university he and his co-founder, Frederik Brix, built a game server hosting platform on container tools such as Mesos and Rancher. He calls game servers "a gateway drug to cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes."

Placement Year at Clock

He studied IT management for business, a mix of business and computer science. In his third year he joined Clock, a UK digital agency, as a placement software engineer. There he saw how long it took to spin up staging environments and new customer infrastructure, and he realized the system he and Brix had built for game servers could deploy any software. Clock now runs on Northflank in production, he told the show.

Leaving University for a European Accelerator

The pair skipped full-time jobs and joined The Family, a European accelerator, to learn how to build a startup. Stewart has written that Northflank picks up where Heroku and Cloud Foundry left off, pairing a self-service developer experience with workloads that run inside a company's own cloud, in a November 2024 company post. Northflank says it has run millions of microVMs a month since 2021, and it now sells sandboxes for agent code on the same platform.