Top Dev Tools Startups to Watch (and Work for) in 2023

My Background

Hi, I'm Kieran! I worked in startups for five years at On Deck and Wefunder. Some of my favorite things that I've worked on during my career include:

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Wefunder Workaway: 12 founders working on a new idea, 7 days, 1 mansion in Hawaii. One of the teams we picked raised a Series A from Andreessen Horowitz, and two people who met during the trip got married...

On Deck: As employee #15, I contributed to the startup's growth from no revenue to a $20 million run rate in less than a year. I led the team that built the admission infrastructure to support and scale ~20 fellowships for founders, capital allocators, operators, and creators.

XX: Worked on a pre-YC accelerator program that invested $125K on an MFN SAFE into 8-10 teams per cohort.

ODX: Worked on a $100 million accelerator program that invested $125K for 7% into 100s of startups. We partnered with leaders like Flexport to build vertical industry tracks around supply chain & logistics, etc.

Ryan Marketing: Created an influencer marketing startup (2 million+ Instagram followers) during college with my twin brother and realized early that monetization for creators was broken. I learned a lot, and it paid enough to cover my schooling, rent, and meals.

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The Methodology

I considered several data points to arrive at the startups selected on this list, including company traction, funding raised, valuation, and investors. From my initial list, I then referenced each startup with my personal network to narrow down the list to the one you see below. I take my credibility seriously, so I do not take any money from startups who want to be included on this list to remain impartial. If you want to understand my analysis of startups and prefer long-form content, read my research on the top startups of 2023 afterward.

Vercel

The platform for frontend developers providing the speed and reliability innovators need to create at the moment of inspiration.

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Industry

Dev Tools

Founded

2015

Funding

$313 million

Valuation

$2.5 billion+

Traction

Vercel serves 41 billion+ weekly requests from developers working with 30+ Vercel frameworks.

Frontend teams at Adobe, Loom, The Washington Post, HashiCorp, Zapier, Okta, and Under Armour are customers of Vercel.

As of 2021, Next.js, a Vercel application, has grown to 2 million weekly npm installs.

Full Profile

Sourcegraph

Sourcegraph builds universal code searches for every developer and company so they can innovate faster.

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Industry

Dev Tools

Founded

2013

Funding

$248 million

Valuation

$2.6 billion

Traction

As of May 2023, Sourcegraph has 1.8 million+ users.

Sourcegraph customers include developers at companies like HashiCorp, Indeed, Yelp, SoFi, Lyft, Thorn, Quantcast, Convoy, F5, CERN, Workiva, FactSet, Nutanix, Neo Financial, Uber, Redfin, Plaid, and Databricks.

Full Profile

Zeet

Zeet helps infrastructure and development teams interact with cloud providers.

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Industry

Dev Tools

Founded

2020

Funding

$6.3 million

Valuation

Undisclosed

Traction

As of September 2022, Zeet has 18,000 users, including developers from Banana.Dev, Otherside.AI, Chef Studios, Circle Labs, and The CM Group.

From January 2023 to April 2023, Zeet saw a 500% increase in the number of applications launched on the platform and 6000% if you look at its last 18 months.

Full Profile

Temporal

Temporal simplifies your application logic to make your code easier to maintain and your developers more productive.

Headquarters

Bellevue, Washington

Industry

Dev Tools

Founded

2019

Funding

$203.5 million

Valuation

$1.5 billion

Traction

In 2022, Temporal Cloud surpassed 100 corporate customers.

As of May 2023, Temporal customers include Instacart, Stripe, DataDog, HashiCorp, Box, Checkr, Netflix, Comcast, Snap, Qualtrics, and Postman.

Full Profile

Deno

A modern runtime for JavaScript and Typescript.

Headquarters

Brooklyn, New York

Industry

Cloud

Founded

2021

Funding

$25.9 million

Valuation

Undisclosed

Traction

As of May 2023, Deno’s open-source solution on GitHub has 89.4k stars, 4.9k forks, and 817 contributors.

Deno rated as one of the most loved web technologies in a survey of 70,000 developers conducted by StackOverflow.

As of May 2023, Deno Runtime has 200,000 monthly active users, with developers at Slack, Netlify, GitHub, and Supabase using the product.

Full Profile

Cortex

Making it easy for engineering organizations to gain visibility into their services and deliver high-quality software.

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Industry

Dev Tools

Founded

2019

Funding

$53 million

Valuation

Undisclosed

Traction

Cortex customers include Dropbox, Rappi, Adobe, Unity, Tripadivsor, Brex, OpenDoor, Grammarly, Affirm, and StockX engineering teams.

Between May 2021 and November 2021, Cortex reported 10x customer growth.

Full Profile

Retool

Build internal tools remarkably fast.

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Industry

Dev Tools, SaaS, No-Code & Low-Code

Founded

2017

Funding

$141 million

Valuation

$3.2 billion

Traction

500,000+ apps have been built on Retool. Retool’s customers include Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Amazon, Allbirds, Rakuten, Peloton, Mercedes Benz, Volvo, and Jaguar Land Rover.

It took Snowflake 60% dilution to get from a valuation of $260 million to $3.55 billion. In comparison, it took Retool around ~9% dilution to achieve a similar rise in valuation.

Full Profile

Release

Get an environment with any code commit.

Headquarters

Remote

Industry

Dev Tools

Founded

2019

Funding

$22.9 million

Valuation

Undisclosed

Traction

Release customers include LaunchDarkly, Navan, Chipper Cash, Moment House, Brave Care, Brevy, Datasaur, Ethos, SimplyInsured, and SoftLedger.

Full Profile

Privy

Privy builds authentication, authorization, and data control tooling so developers can deliver exceptional products that keep users safe.

Headquarters

New York, New York

Industry

Cryptocurrency

Founded

2021

Funding

$8.3 million

Valuation

Undisclosed

Traction

Privy customers include web3 companies like Lighthouse, Mad Realities, Decent, Courtyard, Xeenon, and Molecule.

Full Profile

white polar bear with "oso" underneath on purple background

Oso

Authorization as a service.

Headquarters

New York, New York

Industry

Developer Tools

Founded

2018

Funding

$10.9 million

Valuation

Undisclosed

Traction

Oso customers include Intercom, Ericsson, Verizon, Wayfair, Loyal, Oyster, and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Full Profile

Baselime

Observability for serverless.

Headquarters

London, England

Industry

Dev Tools

Founded

2021

Funding

1.6 million euros

Valuation

Undisclosed

Traction

Baselime customers include developers at Seatfrog, DevStride, Scribe, Trilo, Seedata.IO, and Momento.

Full Profile

Timescale

Cloud-native PostgreSQL.

Headquarters

New York, New York

Industry

Dev Tools

Founded

2015

Funding

$181.1 million

Valuation

$1 billion+

Traction

As of July 2023, Timescale has 4.2 million+ active Timescale databases.

As of July 2023, Timescale has rated 4.7/5 stars from 20 reviews on G2.

As of February 2022, Timescale reported 7x community growth and 20x revenue growth in the past two years.

As of February 2022, Timescale has 500+ paying customers, including Uber, Coinbase, Lucid, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Warner Music Group.

Full Profile

Foxglove

The leading observability platform for robotics developers.

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Industry

Robotics, Dev Tools

Founded

2021

Funding

$18.7 million

Valuation

Undisclosed

Traction

As of October 2022, Foxglove has 3,000+ users on its cloud-based tools and enterprise customers.

As of October 2022, Foxglove reported 8x growth in active users over the past year.

Full Profile

Jam.dev

The fastest bug reporting tool.

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Industry

Dev Tools

Founded

2020

Funding

$3.5 million

Valuation

Undisclosed

Traction

As of July 2023, Jam.dev has 30,000+ users, including teams from Ramp, Unilever, On Deck, Autodesk, Rippling, Klarna, Peloton, and Dell.

As of July 2023, Jam.dev has rated 5/5 stars from 82 Google Chrome web store reviews.

Full Profile

Airplane

Developer infrastructure for internal tools.

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Industry

Dev Tools

Founded

2021

Funding

$40.5 million

Valuation

Undisclosed

Traction

As of September 2022, Airplane reported nearly 100 customers, including Modern Treasury, Vercel, Panther Labs, Dover, Box, Flatfile, Branch, The Rounds, and Copy.ai.

Full Profile

Stytch

Platform for authentication and identity management.

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Industry

Dev Tools

Founded

2020

Funding

$126.3 million

Valuation

$1 billion

Traction

Stytch customers include Checkr, Standard Metrics, Legion Health, Mintlify, Gather, and Contrary Capital.

From July 2021 to November 2021, Stytch increased its customer base from 350 to 4,000 developers.

Full Profile

MindsDB

A cloud for serving artificial intelligence logic.

Headquarters

Berkeley, California

Industry

Dev Tools, Artificial Intelligence

Founded

2017

Funding

$49.4 million

Valuation

$160 million

Traction

As of July 2023, MindsDB has 85,000+ docker deployments and 100+ data integrations.

As of July 2023, MindsDB’s Github has 17.3K stars and 2.2K forks.

As of July 2023, MindsDB has 3,651 developers in its Slack community.

As of June 2023, MindsDB has 100 customers.

Full Profile

Airbyte

Open-source data integration platform.

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Industry

Data

Founded

2020

Funding

$181.2 million

Valuation

$1.5 billion

Traction

As of July 2023, Airbyte has 40,000+ data practitioners on its platform, up from 4,500 in December 2021.

As of July 2023, Airbyte has 4,000+ daily active companies on the platform, including Monday, Unity, Calendly, BetterUp, Petco, Monday.com, and Anker.