TLDR: We raised $60M in new funding, led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from World Innovation Labs, Cross Creek, Alpha Square Group, Patrick and John Collison (Stripe) IVP, Sequoia, and Y Combinator. With this new infusion of capital, we’re looking to further grow developer awareness around IDPs and invest in our platform capabilities with enhanced workflows, engineering intelligence, user interface, and of course, AI.
How did we get here?
The last decade of engineering innovation gave us cloud computing, agile workflows, and service-oriented architectures. These advances lifted the ceiling on engineering output, and dramatically increased demand for talent. For a time, it seemed that a company’s ability to win the market was directly proportional to the number of engineers on staff.
But the knock-on effect of “shipping faster” has been a steep decline in quality and consistency, which has—ironically—slowed time to market.
I saw this firsthand while I was at Uber, where the problem of service sprawl had far-reaching consequences. Manually managing hundreds of custom-built services named after Star Wars characters with missing documentation, unknown owners, and questionable data sounds like a dystopian pre-cloud problem, but we were well past that milestone in 2017. And it’s only getting worse for other tech-forward businesses:
Without a way to track software, owners, or adherence to standards, both incident frequency and duration have reached record highs—introducing business risk.
Developers now spend more time finding information and fixing bugs than building new value—throttling output, and diminishing time to value for each new hire.
Any engineering initiative requiring teams to understand current state and make progress together now takes 3-5x longer than it ever has.
The new DevEx
The truth is that it’s not lack of tooling that’s keeping devs from shipping faster— it’s the daily—costly—activities like hunting for the right information, and fixing bugs that now consume the bulk of their time, slowing time to impact, and ultimately atrophying developer experience. That’s why we built Cortex.
Cortex is an Internal Developer Portal designed to get developers out of a cycle of “finding, fixing, and waiting” by making it incredibly easy to gain context about software state and standards, and act autonomously to move any initiative forward—whether that’s migrating to the cloud, building new platform experiences, improving security posture, or anything else critical to the business. We’re redefining what it means to support developer experience—starting with access to the right information, at the right time.
Where the market is pulling us
Early adopters of Cortex like Adobe, Grammarly, and Opendoor have shown us the potential for IDPs well beyond an engineering system of record, or vehicle for developer self-service. Each, like many other customers, rely on Cortex to catalog services, resources, domains, APIs, ML models, and more, before applying continuous monitoring for standards like ongoing code coverage, vulnerability SLAs, package freshness, and language-specific best practices.
Last year we also added the ability to not only retroactively assess these standards against existing software but apply them to new services and resources that help customers build better from the start. Our Workflows features have seen strong adoption from these customers and others, and there’s still lots more planned to strengthen the flywheel of productivity only IDPs are uniquely positioned to provide. We need greater automation, more intuitive experiences, and deeper cross-functional capabilities—all things that would enable teams to get more from Cortex, with even less interaction.
To support this vision, we’re excited to announce $60M in new funding, led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Sequoia, IVP, and Y Combinator. We’re also happy to welcome Eric Anderson to our board.
"We’re investing in Cortex because it’s solving two mission-critical issues for engineering teams: centralizing the information needed to understand, operate, and build new software, and creating a culture of engineering excellence and continuous improvement. The world's largest enterprises are betting on Cortex to drive the future of their developer experience, and we’re looking forward to seeing what Anish, Ganesh and the Cortex team do next.”
IDPCON
On October 24th in New York City, Cortex will also host IDPCON, the first ever in-person event dedicated to internal developer portals, and the broader themes of developer experience and developer productivity. Investment in improved developer experience is top of mind for engineering leaders across every vertical, and we believe the time is right to bring together the greatest minds in this space and align on some of the industry's most complex challenges. Join us, along with experts from Adobe, Xero, The New York Times, Clear, Skyscanner, and Blackstone to discuss how they are building towards the future of developer experience. We hope to see you there!
If you want to learn more about Cortex, you can book a demo here. We are also hiring!
