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

August 2, 2023
      |      Kieran Ryan
computer logo with a bunch of icons coming out of it

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:

  • 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.

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.

black triangle

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.
Sourcegraph Logo

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.
Zeet Logo

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.
Temporal Logo

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.
Deno Logo

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.
Cortex Logo

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.
Retool Logo

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.
Release Logo

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.
Privy Logo

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.
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.
Baselime Logo

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.
Timescale Logo

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.
Foxglove Logo

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.
Jam.dev Logo

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.
Airplane Logo

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.
Stytch Logo

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.
MindsDB Logo

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.
Airbyte Logo

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.
  • As of July 2023, Airbyte reported syncing 1 petabyte of data and processing 2 billion rows monthly.
  • In 2021, 9,000+ companies synced data on Airbyte.
ClickHouse Logo

ClickHouse

A fast open-source column-oriented database management system.

Headquarters

Palo Alto, California

Industry

Data, Dev Tools

Founded

2009

Funding

$300 million

Valuation

$2 billion

Traction

  • As of July 2023, ClickHouse has 100,000+ developers on its platform.
  • As of July 2023, ClickHouse’s GitHub has 29.8K stars, 5.9K forks, and 1,276 contributors, up from 20K stars and 800 contributors in October 2021.
  • As of July 2023, ClickHouse has 4,025 developers in its Slack community.
  • As of July 2023, developers have made 32,000+ pull requests, up from 20,000 in October 2021.
  • ClickHouse customers include Cloudflare, eBay, Uber, Comcast, and Cisco.
Redpanda Logo

Redpanda

The streaming data platform for developers.

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Industry

Cloud, Dev Tools

Founded

2019

Funding

$165.5 million

Valuation

Undisclosed

Traction

  • As of July 2023, Redpanda claims its compresses your cloud infrastructure costs by 3x and total spending by 6x.
  • Redpanda customers include Activision, Cisco, Lacework, Optimizely, Midjourney, LiveRamp, ShareChat, Moody’s, Texas Instruments, and Wunderkind.
  • In 2022, Redpanda reported 5x revenue growth.
Inngest Logo

Inngest

Effortless serverless queues, background jobs, and workflows.

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Industry

Dev Tools

Founded

2021

Funding

$4.5 million

Valuation

Undisclosed

Traction

  • Inngest customers include developers from TripAdvisor, Yoke, Snaplet, Finta, and Ocoya.
  • As of July 2023, Inngest has 534 members in its Discord community.
  • As of July 2023, Inngest’s Github has 611 stars, 27 forks, and 11 contributors.
Render Logo

Render

Cloud application hosting for developers.

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Industry

Cloud, Dev Tools

Founded

2018

Funding

$77.5 million

Valuation

Undisclosed

Traction

  • Render customers include Red Bull, Watershed, Felt, Indie Hackers, Anker, Bloomscape, Clearbit, 99Designs, Sourcegraph, and jsDelivr.

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