Built solo, in Portugal, for engineers who actually ship.
VULK is the work of one founder writing every line of code, and a deliberate refusal to pretend a front-end mockup is a working app. Bootstrapped, EU-hosted, shipping every day.
Facts you can quote, not metrics made up.
No “11.5K developers”, no “trusted by Fortune 500”. Below is what is actually true and checkable today.
- Founder
- João Castro
- Based in
- Vila do Conde, Portugal
- Funding
- Bootstrapped
- Data residency
- EU (Frankfurt)
- Status
- Live, paying customers
Built for scale, day one.
Operational specs you can verify and quote. No business numbers, no vanity metrics — just what the platform supports today.
- Platforms supported
- 8 (Web, iOS, Android, Flutter, React Native, 3D/WebGL, Shopify, MCP)
- AI models routed
- 16+ (Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.5, Grok 4.20, plus 12 more)
- Languages localized
- 8 (en, pt, de, fr, es, it, ja, hi) with full hreflang
- Preview infrastructure
- Firecracker microVMs — industry-first for AI builders
- Iteration time
- Under 60 seconds, prompt → live preview
- Design patterns indexed
- 1,395+ vector-embedded for retrieval-augmented generation
- Code ownership
- 100% — generated apps run without VULK runtime
- One-click deploy targets
- Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, Netlify, App Store, Play Store
- Data residency
- EU only — AWS Frankfurt + Hetzner Helsinki
How we got here.
Twenty years of code, one product. The short version is below — the longer version is the public commit history.
- Two decades self-taught
Web, mobile, and backend systems for clients and consumer products. Every framework lifecycle, every deployment, every database migration — picked up by shipping, not by lectures.
- VULK launch
The premise was simple — most AI builders stop at the front-end. Real apps need a database, an API, auth, deploy. So VULK does all of it from a single prompt.
- Now (2026)
Multi-agent pipeline routes each step (plan, generate, repair, validate) to the model that's measurably best for it. Firecracker microVMs run live preview. Mobile (Flutter), 3D (Three.js), Shopify, MCP server, BYOM — every layer generated, every layer owned by you.
Two people. Every layer.
Reachable in public. We write the code, the copy, and the customer replies — including this page.
João Castro
Founder & CTO
Full-stack engineer and systems architect with over 18 years of experience building platforms, SaaS products, and large-scale web systems.
“Software should not only be fast to build. It should be reliable to run and safe to evolve.”
Six principles instead of pivoting weekly.
Ship the whole stack
Front-end-only generators leave the hard part — schema, auth, REST, migrations — to the user. VULK generates all of it in the same prompt. That's the only honest definition of 'a working app'.
Code you own, forever
Every project exports as a clean repository: React or Next.js, PostgreSQL, REST endpoints, no proprietary runtime, no kill-switch. If we vanish tomorrow, your app keeps running on your infrastructure.
Pick the right model, every time
VULK isn't 'powered by GPT-X'. It routes each phase — planning, generation, repair, validation — to the model that's measurably best for that step. That's why output quality holds.
Eat the cooking, daily
Internal tools, marketing pages, dashboards, mobile apps — shipped through VULK first. If a feature is bad in day-to-day use, it doesn't reach customers.
EU by design, not by accident
Built in Portugal. Data lives in Frankfurt. Sub-processors are documented. GDPR isn't a checkbox bought from a consultant — it's where VULK lives and how it was built.
Stay small until small breaks
Solo means decisions get made and shipped the same day. The team grows when reality forces it, not when a deck demands it.