🎃 The Unicorn CTO #127 - Thoughtworks Latest Technology Radar

Daniel Jarjoura -

Hello friend,

I know a lot of CTOs and technology leaders who have been treating Thoughtworks' recurring Technology Radar reports as one of their most trusted sources for emerging tech and shifting industry practices. Their latest volume doesn't fall short of insights.

Here are the top trends from the October 2024 report:

  • Generative AI tools and their supporting frameworks are expanding rapidly, moving from simple prompts to complex engineering applications. The Radar likens this growth to the early JavaScript ecosystem, predicting that diverse frameworks, tools, and structured outputs for AI will continue to evolve. This will help companies get LLM-driven products into production faster, opening the door for innovations in tooling for model observability, structured data handling, and production-grade deployments of AI.
  • Observability will move beyond traditional, disconnected monitoring tools. Observability 2.0 brings high-cardinality, high-dimensional event data into a single store, supporting real-time and retrospective analysis. This unified model simplifies data correlation, making it possible to diagnose complex, distributed systems more efficiently and offering teams a comprehensive view of system health.
  • With WebAssembly (WASM) now supported across major browsers, Thoughtworks sees it as a powerful deployment target for portable, cross-platform applications, allowing developers to run complex applications in the browser. As WASM expands, it could reshape how teams think about deploying native applications on the web.
  • Coding assistants, like GitHub Copilot, are increasingly popular as AI-driven pair programmers. However, Thoughtworks advises caution here, noting that these tools often miss the collaborative benefits of traditional pair programming.
  • Software engineering agents, which autonomously complete coding tasks, are highlighted as a promising but still nascent technology. The Radar points out that while these agents are becoming more capable, they are best suited for simpler, well-defined tasks. As tools evolve, they could free developers for higher-value work by handling routine coding activities.

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.

💰 Market Summary - Week of October 21st, 2024

  • 9 companies raised $144.5 million across 7 product categories in 6 countries.
  • Europe-based companies attracted 21% of the total funding vs 21% for Asia-based companies, 8% for South America-based companies and 50% for US-based companies.
  • Cloud is the category that attracted the highest funding.
  • 2 companies provide or contribute to an open-source product.
  • 0 company were acquired this week.

🧩 Funding by Product Category

🌎 Funding by Region

🏢 Funding By Company

Socket, based in San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised $40M in Series B funding led by Abstract Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Socket is a cybersecurity platform that protects companies from software supply chain attacks by safeguarding their applications from threats in open-source code (more)

Neysa, located in Mumbai 🇮🇳, secured $30M in Series A funding from NTTVC and Matrix Partners India. Neysa provides an AI Acceleration Cloud System that enables businesses to deploy and scale AI applications securely and cost-effectively (more)

Genmo, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, garnered $24M in Seed funding led by New Enterprise Associates. Genmo offers the best open-source video generation model available today (more)

DataCrunch, based in Helsinki 🇫🇮, raised $13M in Seed funding from byFounders and J12 Ventures. DataCrunch.io is a new cloud service provider focusing on infrastructure for machine learning applications (more)

CrewAI, located in São Paulo 🇧🇷, secured $12.5M in Series A funding from Boldstart Ventures and Insight Partners. CrewAI streamlines workflows across industries with powerful AI agents for automated business tasks (more)

Oxla, from Warsaw 🇵🇱, raised $11M in Seed funding led by TQ Ventures. Oxla is pioneering next-gen OLAP database technologies for high-volume analytical data processing (more)

Keel, based in London 🇬🇧, garnered $6M in Seed funding from LocalGlobe and Earlybird Venture Capital. Keel offers operational software that delivers the benefits of custom software without needing a large engineering team (more)

Sidero Labs, located in Santa Barbara 🇺🇸, raised $4M in Series A funding from Hiro Capital and Sony Innovation Fund. Sidero Labs’ Talos OS and Sidero Metal streamline Kubernetes operations with their API-driven approach (more)

Qpoint, from Oakland 🇺🇸, secured $4M in Seed funding led by Mango Capital. QPoint addresses the challenges of modern application development with its cloud-based infrastructure and service solutions (more)

🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions

No transactions last week

hiteshchoudhary / apihub (2,248 stars this week) - Your own API Hub to learn and master API interaction. Ideal for frontend, mobile dev and backend developers.

phidatahq / phidata (2,002 stars this week) - Build AI Agents with memory, knowledge, tools and reasoning. Chat with them using a beautiful Agent UI.

OpenInterpreter / open-interpreter (1,402 stars this week) - A natural-language interface to your computer's general-purpose capabilities.

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