🔎 Developer-First #141 - Small Teams are the Future
VCs are increasingly looking at tech team's efficiency with new AI paradigm
Hello friend,
If you’re planning to raise funding soon, VCs are going to challenge you on your ARR per employee ratio.
As the illustration shows, an increasing number of startups like Cursor and ElevenLabs are reaching $100M ARR with fewer than 50 employees.
Behind these examples are two major trends:
📈 AI-first startups are achieving unprecedented growth rates, especially those boosting developer productivity.
Take Lovable, the Swedish startup that hit $10M ARR with just 15 employees in under two months!
👨🏻💻 Tech teams leveraging AI coding copilots are reaching new efficiency levels.
If your company has 30 engineers generating just $5M ARR, expect investors to question why. And if your CTO hasn’t built a serious strategy to maximise team productivity, now’s the time.
Are you ready to play by these new rules?
P.S.: I released last week the 2024 Global Developer-First Transactions Report. If you missed it, click here to access the report.
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.
💰 Market Summary - Week of February 17th, 2025
14 companies raised a little over $1 billion across 7 product categories in 5 countries.
Europe-based companies attracted 1.3% of the total funding vs 0.4% for Asia-based companies and 98.3% for North America-based companies.
Cloud is the category that attracted the highest funding.
4 companies provides or contributes to an open-source product.
0 company was acquired this week.
🧩 Funding by Product Category
🌎 Funding by Region
🏢 Funding By Company
Lambda, from San Jose 🇺🇸, raised $480 million in Series D+ funding led by Andra Capital and SGW. Lambda builds the world’s best GPU cloud, clusters, servers, and workstations, accelerating human progress through computation. (more)
Together AI, based in San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised $305 million in Series B funding led by General Catalyst and Prosperity7. Together AI contributes leading open-source research, models, and datasets to advance AI, offering decentralised cloud services to empower developers and researchers. (more)
Baseten, also from San Francisco 🇺🇸, secured $75 million in Series C funding led by Institutional Venture Partners and Spark. Baseten provides infrastructure for deploying and serving ML models efficiently and cost-effectively. (more)
Arize AI, located in Berkeley 🇺🇸, raised $70 million in Series C funding led by Adams Street Partners. Arize AI is dedicated to making AI successful in production with its observability and LLM evaluation platform. (more)
Gomboc, from New York 🇺🇸, raised $13 million in seed funding led by Ballistic Ventures. Gomboc addresses cloud infrastructure security by providing tailored remediations to Infrastructure as Code (IaC). (more)
ClustroAI, also from San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised $12 million in seed funding led by Forum Ventures. ClustroAI advances Edge AI technologies using containerised architectures and GPU acceleration. (more)
Sawmills, yet another San Francisco 🇺🇸 startup, secured $10 million in seed funding led by Team8. Sawmills is an AI-powered telemetry management platform that optimizes observability costs while improving data quality. (more)
MirrorTab, also based in San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised $8.5 million in seed funding led by Valley Capital Partners. MirrorTab provides advanced web security solutions to protect web applications from cyber threats. (more)
OpenInfer, located in San Mateo 🇺🇸, raised $8 million in seed funding led by Brave Capital. OpenInfer empowers developers to create intelligent agents that run seamlessly on any hardware, ensuring data privacy and reducing costs. (more)
Safe Intelligence, from London 🇬🇧, raised $5.5 million in seed funding led by Amadeus Capital Partners. Safe Intelligence develops software to make AI safe and secure, aiming to ensure trustworthy interactions with AI systems. (more)
Cycloid, based in Paris 🇫🇷, raised $5.2 million in Series A funding from Reflexion Capital. Cycloid optimises platform engineering and promotes digital sobriety with its efficient infrastructure and software delivery solutions. (more)
Lingo.dev, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by Initialized Capital. Lingo.dev automates app localisation, transforming weeks of work into automated pull requests, especially useful for complex UIs with specific terminology. (more)
Onetab, based in Singapore 🇸🇬, raised $3.3 million in seed funding from a diverse group of investors, including SOSV. Onetab develops advanced AI technology to improve workplace efficiency and communication, revolutionising how employees collaborate and achieve productivity. (more)
Serverpod, located in Stockholm 🇸🇪, raised $2.8 million in seed funding led by node.vc. Serverpod is an open-source, scalable app server optimised for the Flutter community, written in Dart, providing a modern backend solution for developers. (more)
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions
No transactions last week.
⭐️ Trending GitHub Repositories
microsoft / OmniParser (✩ 9,419 stars this week) - A simple screen parsing tool towards pure vision based GUI agent.
langgenius / dify (✩ 3,542 stars this week) - Dify's intuitive interface combines AI workflow, RAG pipeline, agent capabilities, model management, observability features and more, letting you quickly go from prototype to production.
infiniflow / ragflow (✩ 3,008 stars this week) - RAGFlow is an open-source RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) engine based on deep document understanding.
👍 Trending Developer-First Products on ProductHunt
Lingo.dev (👍 1 019) - Lingo.dev is an AI Localisation Engine (also mentioned in this week’s transactions). It turns weeks of translation work into automated pull requests. Built by developers for developers, it produces authentic translations by understanding UI elements' placement and microcontext.
Apidog Fast Request (👍 595) - Analyse and detect endpoints in Java/Kotlin projects automatically, send requests with one click, generate OpenAPI Specs without Swagger annotations, and publish Stripe-like API docs in seconds—all within IntelliJ IDEA. Simplify your API workflow today!
Lora (👍 433) - Lora is a local LLM designed for Flutter. It delivers GPT-4o-mini-level performance and is built for seamless integration—call it with just one line of code.
ElevenLabs and Cursor are breaking records but how many of these ultra lean startups will maintain that velocity without burning out their teams or hitting unforeseen scaling challenges?