Wing Cloud shuts down after raising $20 million to reinvent cloud development
Despite investor support and an enthusiastic developer community, the startup couldn’t turn Winglang into a business.
Less than two years after raising $20 million from a who’s who of venture capital and cloud infrastructure leaders, Israeli startup Wing Cloud is shutting down.
In a candid and reflective post on LinkedIn, co-founder and CEO Elad Ben-Israel announced the company’s closure. “After an amazing ride, we’ve made the tough decision to shut down our company, Wing (previously Monada),” he wrote. “It’s bittersweet, but we’re deeply proud of what we built—and even more grateful for the amazing people who joined us along the way.”
Wing Cloud was launched with an ambitious mission: to reimagine how cloud applications are built by unifying infrastructure and application code through a custom programming language called Winglang. “We started this journey with a bold idea: what if building in the cloud didn’t have to be so hard?” Ben-Israel wrote. “What if infrastructure and application code could live together—beautifully and seamlessly?”
The company’s vision struck a chord with developers. Winglang was open-sourced, quickly attracting more than 100 contributors and a lively community of enthusiasts. But converting that excitement into commercial traction proved elusive.
“While developer experience is something engineers care deeply about, it’s not always seen as business-critical by most companies,” Ben-Israel acknowledged. “That made it hard to build a sustainable business around it.”
Wing Cloud officially came out of stealth in July 2023, announcing a $20 million Seed round led by Battery Ventures, Grove Ventures, and StageOne Ventures. Other backers included high-profile angel investors such as Datadog President Amit Agarwal and HashiCorp CTO Armon Dadgar. At the time, the company employed 16 people in Tel Aviv and was co-founded by Ben-Israel, a prominent figure in the cloud development world, and Shai Ber, a serial entrepreneur and former Microsoft engineer.
Winglang promised to abstract away the complexity of cloud development by compiling code into deployable packages across Terraform, CloudFormation, and modern compute environments like AWS Lambda and Kubernetes. It was designed to make cloud infrastructure a first-class part of application development.
But the challenge wasn’t technical—it was commercial. As Ben-Israel put it, “Over the past year, we explored various different directions in the cloud space—looking for a problem we were both passionate about and could build a company around. In the end, we didn’t find the right fit.”
Despite the shutdown, Ben-Israel expressed pride in Winglang and the journey that led to it. “Winglang was a labor of love, and building it was an absolute blast,” he wrote, thanking the “incredible Wingians/Monadians” and investors who backed the vision.
