We’re incredibly excited to announce our Series B financing led by Cack Wilhelm from IVP. This new funding was raised in direct response to the pull from the market we’ve been experiencing as businesses around the world shift their focus towards developer productivity and efficiency. We are proud to have led and defined the internal developer portal (IDP) category over the past three years, and are looking forward to using this additional funding to continue pushing the boundaries for IDPs.
There is no doubt that the fundraising landscape has changed and the bar to raise the next round of funding has never been higher. However, our growth and the success our customers have had transforming their engineering teams signaled to investors that there’s something special happening here at Cortex. Market conditions have also increased the importance of developer experience for executives running engineering teams – further proof of the demand for IDPs and the catalyst for new IDP frameworks such as Spotify’s Backstage.
Cortex has developed the leading IDP that is driving developer productivity, solving service ownership, and supercharging developer experience, while reducing the burden on engineering organizations of building and maintaining home-grown developer portals. It’s why we’re honored to partner with businesses like Docker, Confluent, Grammarly, SoFi, and more as they’ve deployed Cortex to thousands of engineers and have seen tremendous ROI across reliability, security, and developer productivity initiatives. These companies invested in the Cortex platform even in the face of the new economic environment, underscoring Cortex’s place as a mission critical part of their technology stacks.
When we founded Cortex, it was built on our personal experience as engineers. Having to rely on outdated spreadsheets that attempted to track service ownership made it incredibly difficult to handle incidents, develop new features efficiently, and caused thrash in our day-to-day work. That experience led us to building the Service Catalog – the foundation of Cortex which provided a single pane of glass for services, including accurate and up to date service ownership.
As we’ve continued building, our customers consistently tell us that their desired end state is reaching true engineering maturity—a culture of continuous improvement (i.e. an expectation of continuous measurement, continuous accountability, and continuous action).
The service and resource catalogs were the first step toward enabling this. They brought visibility to service ownership in a single pane of glass and helped with on-call incidents – but cataloging alone is not enough. An IDP needs to provide deep integrations into all the tools across an organization’s engineering ecosystem, as well as built-in incentivization for continuous improvement. With this data and connectivity, you can start defining and enforcing best practices, constantly pushing engineering culture toward what each organization defines as “great” – therefore unlocking real ROI from the IDP.
That is why we built these principles into Cortex from day 1 in direct collaboration with our customers. Today, Cortex supports over 50 integrations that weave into every product we’ve built including the industry’s first Scorecards.
The next iteration of IDPs will make it even easier for engineering teams to adopt these best practices by enabling them to take the recommended actions and execute workflows directly in the portal itself. Initiatives and actions help developers prioritize what to focus on while allowing them to work more efficiently. Being able to tie all actions with insights that show business impact is what ultimately drives adoption of the IDP and becomes the foundation for cultural change.
This new funding round will allow us to continue investing in building wider integrations, deeper developer experiences, and automated workflows to make Cortex the platform where engineers can do their best work.
None of this would have been possible without the support of our incredible customer base who continue to put Cortex in the center of critical initiatives around digital transformation, security migrations, reliability sprints, and more. If you think Cortex might be able to help you and your team, schedule a demo with us here. Also, we’re hiring! If our mission inspires you, check out our open positions.
