Funding Wins, Product Launches, and Insightful Blogs in the DevTool World

Welcome to this week's DevNewsletter, your go-to source for the latest and greatest in the world of developer tools. We've got a jam-packed issue for you, filled with exciting funding news, product launches, and insightful blog posts from a couple of the most innovative startups in the industry.

🏆 Funding Wins

Tracebit Secures $5m Seed Funding to Scale Intrusion Detection Canaries

Tracebit announced a $5M seed funding round this week, backed by Accel, Tapestry VC, and several notable angel investors. This funding is set to boost the accessibility of their intrusion detection canaries, a traditionally high-cost security method.

Co-founders Andy Smith and Sam Cox plan to use the funds to expand their team and product. CEO Andy Smith emphasized their mission to make canaries accessible to organizations of all sizes. Their announcement is endorse by some very happy customers:

"Tracebit has allowed our Security team to further understand expected activity and potentially malicious activity within our environment, leading to further hardening measures and more fine tuned detections - all without jeopardizing production resources. Its easy to deploy new canaries which scales well with Docker's rapid development in ensuring we can roll out canaries for new resources." - Rachel Taylor, Director of Security, Risk and Trust at Docker

With positive testimonials from clients like Riot Games and Docker, Tracebit seems poised for success. Congrats Tracebit!

To explore further, head here.

Redactive Raises $11.5M Seed Funding to Turbo-charge Responsible GenAI Adoption

Melbourne-based Redactive AI, co-founded by ex-Atlassian product managers Alexander Valente , Andrew Pankevicius , and AI engineer Lucas (he/him) Sargent , announced an $11.5 million seed funding round.

This hefty sum, led by Blackbird and Atlassian Ventures, is about to supercharge Redactive's mission of enabling enterprises to build, deploy, and responsibly govern their own Generative AI applications.

Redactive's platform tackles the complex problems that traditional software engineers face when implementing LLMs into their application stack. They're not here to replace your engineers or automate their jobs; instead, they're solving for the emerging and lucrative 'data engineering' skillset that's crucial for an AI application to function.

The funds are set to expand their team, boost operations to the US, and continue developing a world-class platform that enhances the capabilities of software teams.

For more insights, read here.

Tembo Drums up $14M to Simplify Database Management Amid AI Demand

Database boom beneficiary Tembo , a startup offering a platform for deploying Postgres to cloud and local environments, has raised $14 million in a funding round.

The round led by GreatPoint Ventures, with participation from Venrock, Grand Ventures, Wireframe Ventures, Defined VC, and Cintrifuse Capital, will help in "harnessing the power of Postgres for everyone", according to Tembo founder and CEO Ry Walker .

Walker, who studied computer science at the University of Cincinnati before pivoting to build a web agency in the '90s, realized his passion for early-stage ventures and founded Tembo after co-founding Astronomer, an open source data engineering pipeline. "After building Astronomer and working on open source passion projects, I realized our model at Astronomer could be applied to the database industry with even more impact," he said.

Tembo provides a managed, metered software-as-a-service Postgres service and self-hosted software to set up and orchestrate Postgres databases, simplifying the complex world of data pipelines and cutting costs.

More details can be found here.

🚀 Lots of Lovely Launches

Pieces Launches Copilot+ with Live Context AND Announces $13.5m Investment

Pieces for Developers , an on-device AI coding assistant, has launched its Copilot+ with Live Context feature that allows developers to save and store code, links, text, images and more!

Live Context is a game-changer, capturing and processing workflow data in real-time, directly on your device. This means you get the right information at the right time in your copilot, without losing focus or compromising privacy.

Tsavo Knott , CEO and Technical Co-Founder of Pieces, shared some key prompts that Live Context enables, like summarizing pull request comments, reviewing research takeaways, and even finding the best time for team sync-ups based on shared calendars. It's like having a personal assistant that actually understands your work!

And as if that wasn't enough news for us to take in this week, they've raised a very impressive $13.5m with participation from Cincinnati’s Cintrifuse Capital, Miami University’s RedHawk Ventures and local high-net-worth investors. Huge well done Pieces Team!

The company intends to use the funds to roll out the next phases of its product.

Go test it out and share your feedback on Product Hunt.

Apify Announces Crawlee for Python; Streamlining Web Scraping and Browser Automation

The team at Apify has launched Crawlee for Python, an open-source library for web scraping and browser automation. Following the success of Crawlee for TypeScript, which has nearly 13,000 stars on GitHub, the Python version aims to simplify the lives of Python web scraping developers.

Saurav Jain , Developer Community Manager at Apify, announced the launch on Product Hunt, highlighting the tool's features including a unified interface for HTTP and headless browser crawling, automatic retries, and integrated proxy rotation and session management, among others.

This launch comes in response to the developer community's continuous demand for a Python version of Crawlee. The company is inviting early adopters to test the beta version and contribute to its development.

For more info, visit Product Hunt or GitHub and go visit the team at EuroPython 2024!

Autoblocks AI Introduces Grid Search for Optimizing LLM-Based Products

Autoblocks AI has launched Grid Search, a new feature that helps AI product teams optimize their language model (LLM) based products by systematically testing combinations of prompts, configs, and models managed through the Autoblocks SDKs.

Haroon Choudery , CEO at Autoblocks, emphasized the challenges AI product teams face when optimizing LLM-based products, likening it to a game of Whac-A-Mole. Grid Search aims to streamline this process by automating the testing of all possible combinations and selecting the best-performing configuration based on evaluation metrics.

Grid Search offers bulk testing, evaluation-driven decision making, and automated version control, enabling faster and more methodical AI product development. Teams can iterate rapidly, deploy confidently, and continuously improve their AI products.

To learn more about Autoblocks Grid Search visit here.

Anthropic Unveils New Tools for Enhancing Prompt Generation and Evaluation

Anthropic needs no introduction but for those who don't know they're pioneering AI development in many ways. This week they introduced innovative tools designed to accelerate and enhance the prompt generation and evaluation process for AI developers. The tools, accessible through the Anthropic Console, simplify the creation of high-quality prompts, a crucial factor in the performance of AI applications.

The Console now offers the ability to generate, test, and evaluate prompts, and even includes automatic test case generation and output comparison features. These additions are set to expedite development, improve outcomes, and ultimately elevate the quality of AI-powered applications.

In an interview from Google Cloud Next earlier this year, Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei emphasized the importance of prompt engineering for widespread enterprise adoption of generative AI. "It sounds simple, but 30 minutes with a prompt engineer can often make an application work when it wasn't before," Amodei stated, highlighting the potential impact of these new tools on the development process.

Discover more here.

MindsDB's Second Beta of Database Mind Makes Data Queries Swift and Conversational

MindsDB has announced the second beta release of Database Mind, a tool that enables users to ask questions in plain language and receive answers directly from a database. MindsDB was founded in 2017 by Adam Carrigan (COO) and Jorge Torres (CEO) to enable developers to quickly integrate Artificial Intelligence Logic into applications and ship AI-powered solutions from prototyping & experimentation to production in a fast & scalable way.

The latest release has significantly improved latency, reducing the average response time from a minute to a mere 13 seconds - that's a whopping 78% improvement.

Database Mind aims to simplify the process of building, connecting, and optimizing AI app infrastructure and reasoning loops, making it easier to maintain context across complex conversations. MindsDB is committed to further improving Database Mind, with plans for faster responses, streaming responses support, and enhanced security options among others. Developers are invited to test Database Mind and provide feedback.

Explore more here.

🔦 DevTools of the Week

ApyHub Fusion: Redefining API Development with Collaborative Power

ApyHub Fusion has caught our eye this week, and for good reason. This all-in-one API development client is shaking things up with its focus on team collaboration and a Notion-esque interface. It's not just another API tool; it's a fresh take on how developers can work together more efficiently.

CEO Samuel Kaluvuri, Ph.D boasts about Fusion's modular and composable approach to API requests, giving developers more flexibility in building and documenting APIs. The tool comes packed with real-time collaboration features, slash commands, and an AI assistant that reportedly saves engineering teams up to 60% of their building time.

This week, ApyHub Fusion rolled out a new feature: document locking. Now you can prevent accidental edits without revoking edit rights from your team. It's a small but mighty addition that shows ApyHub is listening to its users and continuously improving.

They end their blog announcement with "For developers seeking a powerful yet intuitive tool to optimize their API workflows, ApyHub Fusion emerges as a compelling choice. Welcome to the future of API development! Welcome to Fusion!"

For more details, check out ApyHub's website.

Lightrun: Debugging on the Fly Without Breaking a Sweat

Lightrun , the brainchild of Ilan Peleg and Leonid Blouvshtein , is shaking up the developer-native observability space. Born from a chance meeting on a bus ride during military service, this startup has come a long way since its impressive $23 million raise in May 2021.

Their platform lets you add logs, snapshots, and metrics to production apps without the hassle of redeployments or restarts. It's all done straight from your IDE or CLI, making runtime debugging a breeze.

Recently, Lightrun snagged the leader badge on G2 in the DevOps category, along with High Performer badges in several other areas. They're not resting on their laurels though - they're expanding to the USA and hiring across sales, R&D, and product teams in both the USA and in their native Israel :)

It's not often you see a potential unicorn that started life on a bus journey, but Lightrun might just be the exception. Keep an eye on this one!

For more info, check out Lightrun's website.

📖 Read All About It: DevTool Blogs Not to Miss

1. Embrace.io

The engineering team at Embrace , a mobile observability and data platform, has recently shared two insightful blog posts addressing critical challenges in log management and storage efficiency.

Solving Large Logs with ClickHouse

Nathan and Javier, two of Embrace's backend engineers, delve into the challenge of supporting larger log sizes in ClickHouse for their customers.

The Big win: Improved slowest queries from 60 seconds to 1-2 seconds.

Enhancing Storage Efficiency and Reducing Storage Costs with s3-batch-object-store

Pablo Matias Gomez explores how the team built and open-sourced a module for efficiently storing and retrieving objects from a single file in S3.

The Big win: By moving away from Cassandra and leveraging a combination of S3 and Cassandra for indexing, Embrace reduced their storage costs for sessions by an impressive 70%.

2. Qase.io

Qase , a modern test management platform, recently published a very informative blog post on their website.

How Tools Can Improve (or Harm) Relations Between QAs and Developers

Vitaly Sharovatov discusses how the tools QA and dev teams use in their daily work have the potential to improve their relationship, but they can also cause further harm.

Key Takeaways: When used effectively, the right tools can foster collaboration, improve communication, and lead to higher-quality software. However, tools alone cannot solve problems; understanding the problem and potential side effects is crucial.

That was a fun one to write! Thank you all for reaching out with your news.

As always, we'll be keeping our ear to the ground for the latest and greatest in the dev tool world for next week. If you've got a tip or just want to chat, don't hesitate to reach out to Louise Ogilvy or Natalie Harper .