# Austen Collins

> Austen Collins is the San Francisco-based creator of the Serverless Framework and founder and CEO of Serverless, Inc. After working in design, motion graphics, and AWS consulting, he turned an experimental AWS Lambda project called JAWS into an open-source framework, a developer community, and a venture-backed company. His through-line is less about infrastructure itself than the experience around it: package technical change clearly, remove operational drag, and give builders more time to build. In 2026, he introduced Creature, an early-beta desktop environment for building, sharing, and running visual MCP apps.

- **Role:** Founder and CEO at Serverless, Inc.
- **Organizations:** Serverless, Inc., Serverless Framework, Creature
- **Known for:** Created the Serverless Framework, an open-source framework whose GitHub repository shows about 47,000 stars., Built Serverless, Inc. around the framework and raised $13 million in publicly disclosed seed and Series A financing., Recognized as an AWS Community Hero in December 2015.

## Career timeline

- **Before 2015** — Worked in design and motion graphics and later as an AWS consultant.
- **2015** — Created the open-source JAWS project for building applications on AWS Lambda; it was renamed Serverless Framework as Serverless, Inc. was formed.
- **2015-12** — Recognized by Amazon Web Services as an AWS Community Hero.
- **2016-10** — Released Serverless Framework V1 and announced a $3 million seed round led by Trinity Ventures.
- **2018-07** — Serverless, Inc. announced a $10 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing disclosed funding to $13 million.
- **2019** — Expanded the framework toward a full-lifecycle experience including monitoring, testing, secrets management, and security.
- **2022** — Announced that Serverless Cloud would spin off as Ampt while Serverless, Inc. focused on observability and the framework.
- **2024** — Serverless Framework V4 became generally available with native TypeScript support and integrations including Terraform and Vault.
- **2025** — Serverless introduced the Serverless Container Framework and Serverless MCP.
- **2026** — Introduced Creature in early beta as a desktop environment for building, sharing, and running MCP apps.

## Achievements

- Created the Serverless Framework, an open-source framework whose GitHub repository shows about 47,000 stars.
- Built Serverless, Inc. around the framework and raised $13 million in publicly disclosed seed and Series A financing.
- Recognized as an AWS Community Hero in December 2015.
- Helped popularize the term and developer experience associated with serverless application development.
- Established an extensible plugin ecosystem that now lists more than 1,000 plugins in the framework repository documentation.

## Latest updates

- **2026-05** — Serverless Framework published its May update with AWS Bedrock AgentCore support, S3 file mounts, Python improvements, and faster installation.
- **2026-02** — Collins introduced Creature in early beta, describing it as a desktop client and operating-system-like environment for building, sharing, and running MCP apps.
- **2025-04** — Serverless introduced Serverless MCP for bringing AWS resource state, logs, and metrics into AI-assisted IDEs.
- **2025-02** — Serverless introduced Serverless Container Framework for moving workloads between AWS Lambda and ECS Fargate without rewriting the application.

## Links

- Website: https://www.serverless.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austen-collins-80427a69
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/austencollins
- GitHub: https://github.com/austencollins
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/serverless

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/austen-collins
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-08-18