🧑💻 Developer-First #151 - Who’s really making money from AI?
Why consulting firms are winning the AI revenue race—and where startups can seize the next big opportunity.
Hello friend,
IBM just released its quarterly results, and they made $6 billion in AI-related business—80% of it through consulting.
And they’re not alone. Accenture, BCG, and other firms are seeing the same trend.
Large enterprises haven’t scaled AI yet. But they know they need to—and they’re turning to consultants to figure out how. So while the startup world fights over who has the most AI funding or the hottest model, the real money (for now) is being made… with PowerPoint.
But that won’t last forever. Sooner or later, agents will have to move from slide decks to production environments. And this is where AI startup founders come in.
There’s still a massive bottleneck in the “last mile” of AI deployment:
🛡️ Security
🔒 Privacy
📕 Compliance
💾 Integration with legacy systems
The startups that crack these challenges won’t just be part of the hype—they’ll be the ones bringing AI from the boardroom to the data center.
P.S.: On May 15th in Paris, I’m hosting an exclusive breakfast for CIOs, CDOs & IT leaders on the latest fundraising & M&A trends in AI, Data, Cloud, DevTools, and Cybersecurity—plus the top startups to watch. Seats are limited and reserved to IT decision-makers. Click here to request an invite.
Now, let's dive into last week's developer-first transactions.
💰 Market Summary - Week of April 28th, 2025
7 companies raised $329.6 million across 5 product categories in 2 countries.
Europe-based companies attracted 0% of the total funding vs 21.2% for Asia-based companies (Israel) and 78.8% for North America-based companies.
DevOps is the category that attracted the highest funding.
1 company provides or contributes to an open-source product.
1 company was acquired this week.
🧩 Funding by Product Category
🌎 Funding by Region
🏢 Funding By Company
Cast AI, from Miami 🇺🇸, raised $108 million in Series C funding led by G2 Venture Partners and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Cast AI is an autonomous Kubernetes platform that cuts cloud costs, automates DevOps, and boosts reliability for AI and other workloads. (more)
Astronomer, based in New York 🇺🇸, raised $93 million in Series D funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. Astronomer powers mission-critical data products with Astro, a DataOps platform built on Apache Airflow®, enabling enterprise AI and analytics at scale. (more)
Lightrun, from Tel Aviv 🇮🇱, raised $70 million in Series B funding led by Accel and Insight Partners. Lightrun enables developers to instrument logs, metrics, and traces directly from their IDE to troubleshoot live applications without redeploying. (more)
Minimus, based in New York 🇺🇸, raised $51 million in Seed funding from YL Ventures and Mayfield Fund. Minimus redefines cloud application security by eliminating the need for vulnerability triage and remediation through a proactive protection platform. (more)
LlamaIndex, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised an undisclosed investment from Databricks and KPMG. LlamaIndex provides a data framework for LLMs to build production-grade agents capable of querying and acting on complex enterprise datasets. (more)
Structify, based in New York 🇺🇸, raised $4.1 million in Seed funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. Structify delivers enterprise-ready structured data via API, turning messy web data into clean, usable datasets. (more)
Blacksmith, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised $3.5 million in Seed funding led by GV and Y Combinator. Blacksmith offers the fastest and most cost-effective way to run GitHub Actions, cutting execution costs in half. (more)
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions
Census, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, has been acquired by Fivetran. Census is a Universal Data Platform that unifies data transformation, activation, and governance, enabling business teams to drive insights faster with warehouse-native Reverse ETL and embedded integration tools. (more)
⭐️ Trending GitHub Repositories
hacksider / Deep-Live-Cam (✩ 8,191 stars this week) - Real time face swap and one-click video deepfake with only a single image.
kortix-ai / suna (✩ 3,427 stars this week) - Suna - Open Source Generalist AI Agent.
getzep / graphiti (✩ 2,732 stars this week) - Build Real-Time Knowledge Graphs for AI Agents.
👍 Trending Developer Tools on ProductHunt
mrge (👍 896) - mrge is an AI-powered code review platform that automatically reviews PRs and gives human reviewers superpowers.
Daytona (👍 659) - Daytona Cloud reimagines infrastructure for AI agents with sub-90ms startup times, bare metal performance, and stateful execution—capabilities traditional clouds can't match. Create, control, and deploy AI agents with unprecedented speed and flexibility.
Bruno (👍 607) - The API-client built for developers. Open-source. Local . Native git. Bruno stores collections on your filesystem which allows you to natively interact with git for collaboration and versioning.