The Unicorn CTO #126 - Super Angels

Daniel Jarjoura -

Hello friend,

While angel investors used to have a necessary but limited role in financing early-stage startups, I’m seeing a significant shift in how entrepreneurs include them in later-stage rounds.

As expected, angel investors are very present in the first rounds. Since January 2024, 40% of pre-seed to series A fundraising announcements for developer-first startups included at least one business angel. Even more interesting is that some of these angels also participate in later-stage rounds, with at least one angel participating in 18% of series B, 22% of series C and 10% of series D+ rounds.

So, what is driving entrepreneurs to communicate extensively on their angel investors? Mainly validation and credibility. Having angel investors like Guillermo Rauch (Vercel CEO - 9 public deals in 2024), Clem Delangue (Hugging Face CEO - 7 public deals in 2024) or Olivier Pomel (Datadog CEO - 5 public deals in 2024) sends a strong signal to VC investors and customers.

The trend of angel investors deeply engaging with developer-first startups will likely continue, especially as some may become full-time investors like Elad Gil or Nat Friedman. Entrepreneurs should leverage even more credible late-stage founders and big tech operators to increase investors’ and customers’ confidence. And VCs should probably learn to leverage these angels even more. Scouting programs are nascent and probably underused.

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

P.S.: if you're a CTO or tech leader, you can join the free Unicorn CTO Slack community. We're a small group of international CTOs and tech leaders, and we often meet for virtual (or not) coffees.

ERRATUM - Last week, I shared that, OpenGradient had secured $85M in Seed funding. It's actually $8.5M. Sorry for the missing '.' 😅

💰 Market Summary - Week of October 14th, 2024

  • 11 companies raised $147.1 million across 7 product categories in 6 countries.
  • Europe-based companies attracted 34% of the total funding vs 34% for Asia-based companies (inc. Israel) and 32% for US-based companies.
  • DevOps is the category that attracted the highest funding.
  • 4 companies provide or contribute to an open-source product.
  • 1 company was acquired for $45 million.

🧩 Funding by Product Category

🌎 Funding by Region

🏢 Funding By Company

Galileo, based in San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised $45M in Series B funding led by Scale Venture Partners. Galileo provides a GenAI application evaluation and observability platform, supporting the entire AI development workflow. (more)

Port, from Tel Aviv 🇮🇱, secured $35M in Series B funding from Accel and Bessemer Venture Partners. Port transforms the developer experience with its innovative Developer Portal that centralises DevOps practices. (more)

Gladia, headquartered in Paris 🇫🇷, raised $16M in Series A funding led by XAnge. Gladia helps companies extract actionable insights from audio data with its advanced speech recognition API. (more)

dottxt, based in Paris 🇫🇷, announced a combined raise of $11.9 million in funding, split into a $3.2 million Pre-Seed round led by Elaia, quickly followed by a $8.7 million Seed round led by EQT Ventures. dottxt provides a reliable model that generates valid JSON via an API, catering to various data handling needs including synthetic data generation. (more)

E2B, located in Prague 🇨🇿, secured $11.5M in Seed funding from KAYA VC and Sunflower Capital. E2B focuses on code interpreting for AI apps, providing a safe environment for AI-generated code execution. (more)

Zerve, located in Cahir 🇮🇪, secured $7.6M in Seed funding led by Paladin Capital Group and Elkstone. Zerve offers an end-to-end development platform that simplifies the management and deployment of Data Science and AI/ML projects. (more)

Simplismart, from Bangalore 🇮🇳, garnered $7M in Series A funding. Investors include Accel and Titan Capital. Simplismart enhances generative AI workloads with its optimised inference engine and declarative language for deployment. (more)

Early, located in Herzlia 🇮🇱, secured $5M in Seed funding from Zeev Ventures and Dynamic Loop Capital. Early enhances software quality by generating complex working unit tests directly within IDEs. (more)

Edgee, based in Paris 🇫🇷, raised $2.9M in Pre-Seed funding from Serena and VentureFriends. Edgee is a full-stack edge platform that enables developers to build and deploy applications closer to users, optimising workload processing. (more)

Keep, from Tel Aviv 🇮🇱, raised $2.7M in Pre-Seed funding, supported by Runa Capital and Y Combinator. Keep is an open-source AIOps platform that streamlines alert management across monitoring tools. (more)

Platformr, headquartered in Bend 🇺🇸, garnered $2.5M in Seed funding from Oregon Venture Fund and Cascade Seed Fund. Platformr simplifies CloudOps for AWS, enhancing deployment and management of cloud infrastructure. (more)

🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions

CommandAI, headquartered in San Francisco 🇺🇸, was acquired by digital analytics platform provider Amplitude for $45 million to make it easy for teams to take action so they can build products and digital experiences that users love. Founded in 2020, Command AI provides intuitive, AI-powered user assistance to make complex software easier to adopt and navigate. (more)

openai / swarm (8,280 stars this week) - An educational framework exploring ergonomic, lightweight multi-agent orchestration. Managed by OpenAI Solution team.

3b1b / manim (5,212 stars this week) - Animation engine for explanatory math videos.

hcengineering / platform (3,739 stars this week) - Huly — All-in-One Project Management Platform (alternative to Linear, Jira, Slack, Notion, Motion).

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