The Unicorn CTO #119 - The AI Developer

Daniel Jarjoura -

Hello friend,

I'm most certainly biased, but every week I find a new piece of content arguing how AI is changing software development. It's not just about "if" AI will change software development, but "when". The staggering usage numbers of AI copilots, combined with the enormous amount of investments in AI software development, are leading us to an unequivocal truth: tomorrow's software team will be very different from they are today. I'm curious as to how you are adapting to this new reality in your company.

Meanwhile, developer-first startups continue to attract investments week after week, with data and foundational AI models companies currently taking the lion's share of VC funding. Some of them are using this funding to consolidate their product offerings, like OpenAI, which announced two acquisitions last week.

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Now, let's dive into last week's developer-first transactions.

💰 Market Summary

  • 8 companies raised $523.8M across 4 product categories in 3 countries.
  • Europe-based companies attracted 18.8% of the total funding vs 81.2% for US-based companies.
  • Data Management attracted the highest funding.
  • 2 companies were acquired.

🧩 Funding by Product Category

🌎 Funding by Region

🏢 Funding By Company

CData, headquartered in Chapel Hill 🇺🇸, secured $350M in Late VC funding from Accel and Warburg Pincus, enhancing data connectivity across diverse platforms. (more)

Stability AI in London 🇬🇧 raised $80M in Early VC funding from Greycroft, Coatue Management, Sound Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sean Parker, Eric Schmidt, and Prem Akkaraju to build open AI tools. (more)

Coder, an Austin-based company 🇺🇸, raised $35M in Series B funding from Georgian Partners, Uncork Capital, Notable Capital, and Redpoint Ventures for cloud-based development environments. (more)

Onehouse, based in Menlo Park 🇺🇸, raised $35M in Series B funding from Craft Ventures, Addition VC, and Greylock Partners to provide a cloud-native managed lakehouse service utilising Apache Hudi. (more)

Dust, a Paris-based company 🇫🇷, raised $16M in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital, XYZ Venture Capital, GG1, Connect Ventures, Seedcamp, and Motier Ventures to develop AI assistants that encapsulate company knowledge. (more)

Daytona, a New York startup 🇺🇸, garnered $5M in Seed funding from Upfront Ventures and 500 Emerging Europe to simplify the setup of development environments on any infrastructure with a single command. (more)

Chift from Paris 🇫🇷 raised $2.3M in Seed funding from Entourage, Shapers, and Seeder Fund to enable software companies to activate multiple native integrations through one connection to their API. (more)

APIGen from Denver 🇺🇸 secured $500K in Pre-Seed funding from Varana Capital to develop APIs using generative AI with advanced features like built-in testing and security validations. (more)

🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions

Multi, a San Francisco-based company 🇺🇸 offering multiplayer collaboration tools for macOS and Rockset, located in San Mateo 🇺🇸, an alternative to Elasticsearch for building search, analytics, and AI applications, were both acquired by OpenAI for undisclosed amounts. (more here and here)

📚 What I read last week

The AI Developer - Marie Brayer, GP at Fly Ventures, explores the frontier of AI in software development, focusing on AI's role from code generation to building entire software systems. Part 1 reviews current AI tools like GitHub Copilot and discusses the advancements and limitations in AI-assisted coding. Part 2 advances the discussion towards the potential of AI to autonomously create full software applications, examining technical blockers and assessing model-centric and hybrid approaches.

Winds of Change - Longtime software industry analyst Buck on Software predicts in this blog post significant advancements in AI reliability and usefulness, set to transform software development within 18 months. The author explores potential market shifts, suggesting that AI could lead to a larger task-based market opportunity (Task TAM) significantly exceeding the current software market size (Software TAM).

LLM101n: Let's build a Storyteller - Amazing course from OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy on how to build a Storyteller AI Large Language Model (LLM) similar to ChatGPT.

3 surprising findings from our 2024 Global DevSecOps Survey - This latest survey by GitLab highlights that while AI integration is prompting teams to consolidate toolchains and speed up developer onboarding, there is growing concern about AI's risks and its impact on jobs. (link to the full report)

Thanks for reading this far! I'm excited to make this newsletter as helpful as possible and I would appreciate if you could share feedback or anything you want to find here.

Farewell,

Daniel