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Music: James Elmore - Quarter Past Nine (1954)

This week is a quarterly roundup of links to DevEx/DevX VC funding and M&A related news you might have missed.

Getting Informed

This week we take a break from music inspired layout and will focus on the key news in January, February, and March you might have missed relating to DevEx/DevX related venture capital funding as well as mergers and acquisitions. Don’t worry, we’ll be back to music inspired layout again in April.

Why the break? Feedback and metrics have intensified the experimental itch.

Linking LinkedIn Lessons Learned

It’s time for my monthly #newsletter… about my weekly #newsletter — Fudge Sunday Monthly for March looks at #linkedin #buttondown #links #metrics 🤔📈📉📊

Also, readers asking “what do I need to know” and “what is going on with VC lately” about recent news is worth exploring. Here’s to this experimental issue and more experiments to follow.

January

There are some really amazing companies, making a difference in how practitioners and organizations can accelerate their journey in both platform, engineering, as well as overall cloud adoption. Some of those companies remain independent, and others have been acquired.

Techmeme: Dell acquires Tel Aviv-based Cloudify, a platform for cloud orchestration and infrastructure automation, sources say for ~$100M; Cloudify raised less than $8M (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

By Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.

Even with a constant drumbeat of gloom and doom in tech news coverage (because something something deal flow), there are actually many bright spots and stories to celebrate. As I said back in 2012, in the rush to report, always consider the tone of the coverage in all things tech journalism related.

February

I’m no Pollyanna, but if you were only paying attention to headlines, it would seem that venture capital has closed every door and settled in for some kind of existential hibernation. Unfortunately, for those headline writers, it doesn’t really make sense if you are looking at developer experience related investing.

Techmeme: Netlify, a cloud service for automating web development projects, acquires its competitor Gatsby, which had raised $46.8M to date, for an undisclosed price (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)

By Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.

Techmeme: Magic, a code-generating tool similar to GitHub’s Copilot, raised a $23M Series A led by Alphabet’s CapitalG; Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, and Amplify also invested (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

By Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.

Techmeme: Tel Aviv-based Oligo Security, whose security and observability tools detect and prevent open-source vulnerabilities, raised $28M across a seed and a Series A (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)

By Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.

Techmeme: Descope raised a $53M seed led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and GGV Capital to build a “developer-first” authentication and user management service (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

By Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.

Techmeme: Austin-based ProsperOps, whose software automatically optimizes cloud resources, raised a $72M Series A led by H.I.G. Growth, after previously raising ~$800K (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

By Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.

Techmeme: Tel Aviv-based cloud security startup Wiz raised a $300M Series D led by Lightspeed at a $10B valuation, up from $6B in October 2021 after its $250M Series C (Meir Orbach/CTech)

By Meir Orbach / CTech. View the full context on Techmeme.

Techmeme: NYC-based Entitle, which helps businesses automate permissions for developers accessing cloud resources, raised a $15M seed led by Glilot Capital Partners (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)

By Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.

Techmeme: Temporal, an open-source microservices orchestration service, raised a $75M “Series B-Prime” at a $1.5B+ valuation, following a $103M Series B in February 2022 (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)

By Taylor Soper / GeekWire. View the full context on Techmeme.

Also, there was M&A activity. For example…

IBM acquires GraphQL startup StepZen to step up its game in API management | TechCrunch

StepZen, founded by the same team that had started Google-acquired Apigee, had raised just $8M

Has venture capital slowed? Has venture-capital become more intense with regard to diligence? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

March

A few readers asked about the slowdown in news for mergers and acquisitions. Well, again, slowdown is relative.

Techmeme: HPE acquires Axis Security, which helps companies stay secure when staff work remotely, via HPE’s subsidiary Aruba; Axis has raised $100M (Michael Novinson/BankInfoSecurity.com)

By Michael Novinson / BankInfoSecurity.com. View the full context on Techmeme.

If you read Ed Sim or Tomas Tunguz, you probably noticed this tweet:

So, where will the investments be headed towards in the real of platform engineering and developer experience? Great question.

Techmeme: NYC-based Vantage, which helps companies manage and cut their cloud costs, raised a $21M Series A led by Scale Venture Partners, after a $4M seed in June 2021 (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)

By Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.

Techmeme: Tel Aviv-based cloud security startup Mitiga raised a $45M Series A extension led by ClearSky Security at a $100M+ valuation, taking its total funding to $77M (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

By Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.

Techmeme: Maryland-based Aembit launches its workload identity and access management service and announces a $16.6M seed from Ballistic Ventures and Ten Eleven Ventures (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)

By Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.

While nothing in this newsletter or my content creation should be viewed as investment advice, I’d suggest looking at the DevOps Benchmarking Study 2023, Sequoia’s views on what comes next, and investments in quantum computing in order to identify some possibilities for what would make DevOps and platform engineering more aligned to beneficial business outcomes.

Whitepaper: DevOps Benchmarking Study 2023 | Humanitec

A large divide exists between top and low performing engineering teams, with Internal Developer Platforms playing a key role that differentiates performance.

Developer Tools 2.0 | Sequoia Capital US/Europe

Generative AI stands to change how work happens in one industry after another. But software engineering’s transformation isn’t done yet.

Techmeme: Austin-based quantum computing startup Strangeworks raised a $24M Series A led by Hitachi Ventures with participation from IBM and Raytheon Technologies (SiliconHills)

From SiliconHills. View the full context on Techmeme.

Of course, many of these links were just a quick search away on Techmeme. Does that means the links are exhaustive? Hardly.

So, what will be the next big thing in DevX/DevEx related venture capital funding as well as mergers and acquisitions?

Until then… Place your bets!

Work Plug

As a reminder, after a +25 year walkabout, I’m an IBMer (again). For 2023, in “Work Plug”, I’ll share a new link each week that is educational, accessible, and relevant to platform engineering from fellow IBMers¹ in the wider IBM Community.

Stay tuned!

Disclosure

I am linking to my disclosure.