💂 Developer-First #139 - AI Agents for Software Development Agencies
The biggest opportunity of the decade
Hello friend,
Running a software development agency is no easy feat. Hitting 15% EBITDA margins after covering all costs often feels like a miracle—especially in a flat market like 2024.
But over the past few months, I’ve become convinced that AI agents will allow the smartest agencies to 10x their productivity.
These agencies will win by integrating tools like:
✅ ChatGPT or Claude, to summarise user feedback and draft specifications.
✅ Lovable or Bolt.new (or co.dev mentioned below), to generate beta applications from natural language prompts.
✅ GitHub Copilot or Cursor, to convert beta versions into optimised, scalable code.
✅ Kapptivate or QA Wolf, to automate software testing.
And what about humans? They’ll do what they do best: guiding clients, understanding business problems, iterating based on feedback, and of course, steering the AI.
For clients: faster, more efficient iterations leading to better results.
For agencies: more clients, better margins, and a competitive edge.
The opportunity is massive. Will agencies seize it?
P.S. : I’m organising this Thursday, February 6th, an online Ask Me Anything session with Stanislas Polu, Co-Founder of Dust and former Research Engineer at OpenAI, to explore the fascinating world of building AI agents. Sign up here if you want to attend.
P.P.S.: if you're a CTO or tech leader, consider joining the free Unicorn CTO Slack community. We're a small group of international CTOs and tech leaders, and we often meet for virtual (or not) coffees.
Now, let's dive into last week's developer-first transactions. Beware, this was a very “dry” week (just 2 transactions).
💰 Market Summary - Week of January 27th, 2025
2 companies raised $12.5 million across 2 product categories in 2 countries.
Europe-based companies attracted 20% of the total funding vs 80% for North America-based companies.
DevTool is the category that attracted the highest funding.
1 company provides or contributes to an open-source product.
0 company was acquired this week.
🧩 Funding by Product Category
🌎 Funding by Region
🏢 Funding By Company
Oumi, based in Seattle 🇺🇸, raised $10 million in Seed funding led by Venrock and Obvious Ventures. Oumi is pioneering an unconditionally open-source AI platform designed to democratise AI development, allowing users to build, evaluate, and deploy AI models at any scale. (more)
Kodesage, from Budapest 🇭🇺, raised $2.5 million in Pre-Seed funding led by PortfoLion Capital Partners. Kodesage is developing an enterprise solution that helps engineering teams understand complex software projects and modernise legacy systems efficiently. (more)
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions
No transactions last week
⭐️ Trending GitHub Repositories
ollama / ollama (✩ 7,193 stars this week) - Get up and running with Llama 3.3, DeepSeek-R1, Phi-4, Gemma 2, and other large language models.
open-webui / open-webui (✩ 5,767 stars this week) - User-friendly AI Interface (Supports Ollama, OpenAI API, ...).
deepseek-ai / DeepSeek-Coder (✩ 5,265 stars this week) - DeepSeek Coder: Let the Code Write Itself.
👍 Trending Developer-First Products on ProductHunt
co.dev (👍 693) - Skip the complexity, high costs, and limitations of no-code tools—our AI-powered platform lets you create scalable, modern full-stack apps using natural language, all while keeping full ownership of your code.
OpenAI o3-mini (👍 522) - The newest, most cost-efficient reasoning model from OpenAI. Excels at STEM—science, math, & coding. Features include function calling & structured outputs. Available in ChatGPT & the API. Optimized for speed & exceptional performance.
Agora API (👍 485) - The Agora API enables developers to search, purchase, and track orders for 10 million products sold on 25,000 Shopify and WooCommerce stores. We provide a complete set of endpoints to power an end-to-end shopping experience in your app.