The Latest Funding Wins and Advancements in DevTools Startups
Develocity
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It's been an incredible week in the world of developer tools, with game-changing funding rounds, ground-breaking product launches, and a flurry of innovation that's set to reshape the way we build and deploy software. In this jam-packed edition, we'll take you on a whirlwind tour of the most exciting developments, from the cutting-edge AI tech that's making waves to the low-code platforms that are democratizing app development.
?? Funding Wins
Observe Catches the Eye with $115M Funding ???
Observe, Inc. , not your average data observability platform, has recently secured a hefty $115 million in Series B funding, thanks to Snowflake's investment. Striving to make sense of the data chaos across various applications, Observe's tools are a beacon for developers navigating the complex seas of data silos. The Series B values the startup at between $400 million and $500 million. CEO Jeremy Burton said the promise of saving money on data storage is driving demand. A partnership with Snowflake not only opens new doors but also underlines Observe's unique position in the data observability sphere. Congrats Observe!
Coro Locks Down $100M to Shield SMBs from Cyber Threats ??
Coro , the cybersecurity guardian for small and medium businesses, has secured a massive $100 million Series D funding round led by One Peak. With a valuation soaring over $750 million, Coro's mission to democratize cybersecurity for the underserved SMB sector is more relevant than ever. Dror Liwer , Coro’s co-founder, notes, "The barrier of entry for attackers has dropped dramatically," underscoring the increasing need for Coro's comprehensive security solutions. Well done Coro!
StealthMole Unearths $7M to Illuminate the Dark Web ??
Singapore-based StealthMole has raised $7 million in Series A funding to shine a light on dark web threats using AI. Korea Investment Partners led the round, supporting StealthMole's mission to establish more R&D centers and expand commercially. CTO Simon Choi emphasized the importance of location: "Having an R&D office in South Korea allows us to gain critical insights into how hackers from East Asia operate." StealthMole's unrivaled expertise in Asia-related threats positions them as a vital ally for businesses.
Oriole Networks Lights the Way with ￡10M for Faster AI ??
UCL spinout Oriole Networks has nabbed an impressive ￡10 million seed round to revolutionize AI training using light to connect thousands of AI chips. The funding, one of the largest UK seed rounds recently, was co-led by UCL Technology Fund, Clean Growth Fund, XTX Ventures, and Dorilton Ventures. CEO James Regan emphasized the urgency of their mission: "As the demand for compute continues to increase, it is critical to find new solutions that can address these challenges in a sustainable and carbon-efficient manner." By forming a "super-brain" with connected chips, Oriole can train large language models up to 100x faster while slashing energy consumption.
Foundational Builds a Solid Base with $8M Seed Round ??
Foundational , the startup bringing order to the chaos of modern data infrastructure, has emerged with an $8 million seed round led by Viola Ventures and Google's Gradient Ventures. By automatically mapping and analyzing data teams' code, Foundational identifies potential issues and helps prepare data for AI applications. CEO Alon Nafta highlighted the platform's AI-readiness: "In the past year, year and a half or so, we really built the ability to automatically map and understand the code that data teams are writing, and also connect it to this new AI world or universe that we have." The platform integrates with tools like GitHub to provide actionable suggestions directly in developers' workflows, laying the groundwork for data-driven innovation.
?? Lots of Launches
IvyCheck Safeguards AI Apps with Real-Time Risk Detection
IvyCheck offers an API designed to classify user- and AI-generated texts while extracting sensitive data, ensuring the safety and quality of AI apps in real-time. The startup tackles AI risks such as prompt injection attacks, PII data leakage, and hallucinations. Co-founders Tammo Rukat and Dustin Lange , who met at Amazon, are "obsessed with delighting our customers and solving their toughest challenges!" IvyCheck's specialized machine learning models provide flexible, secure, and fast checks that seamlessly integrate with just two lines of code.
Empower.dev Launches empower-functions to Supercharge LLMs with API Integrations
Empower(YC S23) announces empower-functions, a model delivering GPT-4 level function call capabilities but with triple the speed and a tenth of the cost. Co-founders Yulong Liu and Daiyi Yang , driven by the vision to balance high quality with efficiency, have created empower-functions to meet the critical need for a balanced solution between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. The model excels at handling complex, multi-turn conversations and can process multiple API calls simultaneously, making it a game-changer for businesses looking to automate customer interactions and streamline operations. Developers gain a reliable tool for multi-turn and parallel calling use cases, streamlining the integration of APIs into workflow automation and support tasks.
Keywords AI Simplifies Building and Scaling AI Apps with Just 2 Lines of Code
Keywords AI (YC W24) , a YC W24 company, has launched a unified DevOps platform that makes it dead simple to build and monitor AI applications in production. Co-founders Andy Li and Raymond Huang combined their expertise to solve challenges like time-consuming infrastructure setup and difficulties in collaborating on prompt engineering. Keywords AI offers a comprehensive platform with all the features needed to build, deploy, and scale LLM applications, making it easier than ever to create products people love.
Renderlet Introduces a Game-changer in Graphics Programming.
renderlet has launched a WebAssembly framework that enables developers to write portable, GPU-accelerated 2D and 3D graphics code without expert-level knowledge. Founder Sean Isom , who previously built developer platforms at Adobe, explains, "Anybody should be able to build interactive applications without having to be a graphics programming expert." Renderlet's compiler, renderer, and visual editor abstract away the complexities of GPU programming, making it easy to build entire graphics and visualization pipelines out of reusable rendering modules.
领英推荐
Lantern Lights Up the Database World
Lantern 's launch on Y Combinator introduces a Postgres vector database that's both easy to use and capable of scaling to billions. With product quantization and a managed cloud service in beta, Lantern offers a seamless transition for those using standalone vector databases. Di Qi and Narek Galstyan , leveraging their extensive backgrounds, have designed Lantern to integrate vector search into the familiar environment of Postgres, significantly reducing complexity and cost. The company offers a managed Cloud service and a self-hosted option.
Hasura Introduces V3 with Supergraph for API Composability
Hasura has announced V3 of its platform, featuring a domain-centric supergraph modeling framework, a distributed execution engine, and an open source connector ecosystem. CEO Tanmai Gopal highlights how Hasura V3 simplifies workflows for serving data via APIs. The new platform also includes features like API previews, rollback, and a redesigned console. Components of Hasura V3 will be made available in beta throughout April.
?? DevTools of the Week
Lightning AI Strikes with Thunder: Next-Gen Deep Learning Compiler for PyTorch
Lightning AI , the company behind the wildly popular PyTorch Lightning with over 100 million downloads, has unleashed Thunder, a powerful source-to-source compiler for PyTorch. Unveiled at the NVIDIA GTC AI conference, Thunder is designed to train and serve the latest generative AI models across multiple GPUs with maximum efficiency.
In real-world scenarios, Thunder achieves up to a 40% speed-up for training large language models (LLMs) compared to unoptimized code, potentially saving weeks of training time and significantly lowering costs. Developed with support from NVIDIA, Thunder integrates the company's best executors, such as nvFuser, Apex, and CUDA Deep Neural Network Library (cuDNN), as well as OpenAI's Triton, ensuring optimal performance for each mathematical operation.
CEO and founder William Falcon expressed his excitement: "I couldn't be more thrilled for Lightning AI to lead the next wave of performance optimizations to make AI more open source and accessible."
Lightning AI's CTO Luca Antiga highlighted the benefits of Thunder combined with Lightning Studios: "Thunder, combined with Lightning Studios and its profiling tools, allows customers to effectively utilize their GPUs as they scale their models to be larger and run faster."
FlutterFlow Meets High Impact with Series A Funding and Windows Launch
FlutterFlow , the game-changing low-code platform for mobile and web app development, has just expanded its reach with a new launch on Microsoft Windows. This strategic move brings FlutterFlow's powerful app-building tools to an even broader audience, making it easier than ever for developers to create stunning applications across multiple platforms.
Co-founders Abel Mengistu and Alex Greaves , drawing on their experience at Google, have made it their mission to democratize app development. FlutterFlow's open development approach and AI-powered code assistant enable developers to build high-quality apps up to 10 times faster than traditional methods. One satisfied customer shared, "FlutterFlow has helped me learn Flutter as well as the general app building process. It is not as accessible as some comparable tools, but allows for much more possibilities. It has helped me build great working apps, which are 1:1 with my custom design and work very well on all platforms."
With a growing user base of around 1 million and a recent Series A funding round of $25.5 million, FlutterFlow is well-positioned to continue simplifying digital experiences across mobile and desktop environments. Mengistu emphasized the company's focus on providing value to customers, stating, "FlutterFlow is a tool that allows customers to accelerate timelines and increase productivity... Therefore, headwinds can present an opportunity for us as decision makers are looking for ways to execute on ambitious product roadmaps amidst increasing financial constraints."
? Bonus News: Sydney Cohen from Axolo is hosting, what promises to be a very interesting discussion with Dana Lawson, Netlify's CTO.
It will explore her inspiring journey to tech leadership, her commitment to making web development more accessible and how she leverages her extensive and diverse background and experience (GutHub and the military) to power developers and drive innovation.
Register now, here: https://lu.ma/netlify
And there you have it – a whirlwind tour of the most exciting developments in the world of developer tools!
What ties all these stories together is a common thread: the drive to make software engineering faster, easier, and more accessible than ever before.
We'll see you next week!
Louise Ogilvy and the Develocity Team
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