Dillon Nys

Dillon Nys
Occupation	Software engineer, entrepreneur
Known for	Co-founder and CEO of Celest

Dillon Nys is an American software engineer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Celest, a backend-as-a-service platform for Flutter and Dart developers. Celest was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2024 (W24) batch.

Career

Before founding Celest, Nys led development of the Amplify Flutter libraries at Amazon Web Services (AWS). In that role, he contributed to open-source tooling for Dart and Flutter developers, including authoring a blog post in August 2022 introducing the AWS SigV4 Signer for Dart, a library that enables developers to sign and send HTTP requests to AWS services using their AWS credentials. He has also worked at Medtronic, where he was involved in mobile application development. According to professional profiles, Nys has approximately eight years of experience in software engineering, spanning cloud infrastructure, authorization tooling, and mobile development across both large technology companies and early-stage startups.

Nys founded Celest to address a gap in the Flutter ecosystem: the lack of a streamlined, Dart-native backend solution. Celest is described as "the Vercel of Flutter," providing Flutter developers with tools to build, deploy, and manage backend infrastructure entirely in Dart. The platform allows developers to annotate Dart functions with a @cloud decorator to convert them into serverless functions. It also offers an integrated database layer using the Drift schema and supports single-command deployment to Celest Cloud via its command-line interface. The product is designed to enable Flutter developers to become full-stack developers without leaving the Dart programming language.

Celest is based in San Francisco, California. The company participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch.

Nys remains active in open-source development, maintaining projects related to Dart, Flutter, and cloud developer tooling.