Bowery.io wants to set up your Web developer's work environment in 30 seconds

When Zachary Hamed took a break from school to be a Thiel Fellow, he and his partners created Bowery.io, a service for Web developers that more or less sounds like a miracle even our own tech team couldn’t believe.

Today, the startup is releasing the desktop app version of its product (previously only available as a command line tool) and announcing that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding.

Bowery.io is a cloud-based automation of a development environment, that is, the set up and configuration of a developer’s tools, software, and applications. Typically, developers spend hours setting up their environment, which includes loading and configuring software, to match their team’s.

But with Bowery.io, a Web developer can create an account, hook up his or her Amazon Web Services keys (Bowery.io is currently only compatible with AWS), and go through that initial configuration process. After that, a team member or new hire can set up an identical development environment … in under 30 seconds.

No, really. Zach Hamed, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, told VentureBeat his team’s tests have benchmarked at under 30 seconds.

On the spectrum of Web development tools, Bowery.io sits somewhere near browser-based integrated development environments (IDEs) like Nitrous.io, Koding, and Cloud9. However, unlike them, it doesn’t work through a browser, and development is hosted in AWS, not on the company’s own servers. It’s also not as complex to set up as Vagrant, and it doesn’t require the use of virtual machines in order to do local development.

Next, the startup wants to grow beyond its user base of individuals and small team to land enterprise customers. Hamed assured me that its infrastructure is fully ready to take on this size of customers, despite being a small startup. I’m still skeptical about whether or not being limited to AWS (for now) and needing an Internet connection will still make the product attractive to larger companies.

The startup raised its funds from SV Angel, Google Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, RRE, Homebrew, Betaworks, BOLDstart Ventures, Magnet Agency, Deep Fork Capital, and angel investors Naveen Selvadurai, and Ryan Holmes. It plans on using this to expand its teams and growing a base of enterprise customers.

Bowery.io was founded in 2013 by Zachary Hamed, David Byrd, and Steve Kaliski and is based in New York City.