🧑💻 Developer-First #154 - Financials are part of your fundraising story
What founders can learn from Perplexity’s aggressive accounting strategy
Hello friend,
Many founders forget that financial statements tell a story too, and in a fundraising process, every line matters.
Take Perplexity AI, for example. According to The Information, the company spent $57 million in 2023 to run its AI models, including $15 million on AWS cloud costs.
But here’s the twist: none of these expenses showed up in Cost of Revenue. Instead, they were booked as R&D.
Why does that matter? Because COGS reduces your gross margin, while R&D is excluded from that metric. Thanks to this accounting choice, Perplexity reports a 60% gross margin.
In reality, if those infrastructure costs were included in COGS, as they often are for infra-heavy AI startups, their gross margin would likely be negative.
This reclassification is legal, but it is also very aggressive. And it paints a more attractive picture to investors, but one that may not accurately reflect long-term operational realities.
The takeaway? If you’re building an AI startup with heavy infrastructure costs, don’t treat your financials as an afterthought. Your P&L can either raise questions or reinforce your growth narrative.
And in today’s market, where metrics are scrutinised more than ever, even your AWS bill can shape investor perception.
Now, let's dive into last week's developer-first transactions.
💰 Market Summary - Week of May 19th, 2025
7 companies raised $279 million across 5 product categories in 1 country.
Europe-based companies attracted 0% of the total funding vs 100% for North America-based companies.
AI is the category that attracted the highest funding.
2 companies provides or contributes to an open-source product.
2 companies were acquired this week.
🧩 Funding by Product Category
🌎 Funding by Region
🏢 Funding By Company
LMArena, from San Francisco 🇺🇸 raised $100 million in Seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and UC Investments. LMArena is an open platform for comparing AI models side by side, helping build a public leaderboard that reflects real-world performance. ( more )
Gravitee, based in Boulder 🇺🇸 (and originally from France), raised $60 million in Series C funding led by Sixth Street Growth. Gravitee helps companies manage APIs, event streams, and AI agents from a single unified platform. ( more )
RevenueCat, from Brandon 🇺🇸 raised $50 million in Series C funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. RevenueCat helps developers build, analyze, and grow subscription revenue across iOS, Android, and web platforms. ( more )
DataHub, from Palo Alto 🇺🇸 raised $35 million in Series B funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners. DataHub offers an enterprise metadata platform for deploying AI with production-ready discovery, observability, and governance. ( more )
Pixee, from Palo Alto 🇺🇸 raised $15 million in Seed funding led by Decibel Partners and Wing VC. Pixee automates code security by fixing vulnerabilities and triaging scanner findings for engineers and AppSec teams. ( more )
StackHawk, from Denver 🇺🇸 raised $12 million in Series B funding led by Sapphire Ventures and Costanoa Ventures. StackHawk enables developers to scan, triage, and fix AppSec bugs directly in their code and CI/CD pipelines. ( more )
Meibel, from Washington DC 🇺🇸 raised $7 million in Seed funding led by Mosaic General Partnership. Meibel provides runtime visibility and control for teams scaling generative AI applications. ( more )
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions
Zenoss, from Austin 🇺🇸 was acquired by Virtana. Zenoss provides a SaaS-based intelligent IT operations platform that helps prevent service disruptions by streaming and normalizing machine data across complex IT environments. ( more )
Thru, from Irving 🇺🇸 was acquired by Boomi. Thru offers cloud-native managed file transfer (MFT) solutions with no-code integration tools, optimised for secure and scalable enterprise data exchange. ( more )
⭐️ Trending GitHub Repositories
public-apis / public-apis (✩ 5,692 stars this week) - A collective list of free APIs.
virattt / ai-hedge-fund (✩ 4,847 stars this week) - An AI Hedge Fund Team.
f / awesome-chatgpt-prompts (✩ 1,855 stars this week) - This repo includes ChatGPT prompt curation to use ChatGPT and other LLM tools better.
👍 Trending Developer Tools on ProductHunt
Appwrite Sites (👍 840) - With Sites, Appwrite offers a streamlined solution for easily deploying static and server-rendered applications. Everything is designed to simplify your workflow, from creating a site and connecting a domain to leveraging our templates.
Cua (👍 396) - Cua is the Docker for Computer-Use Agent, an open-source framework that enables AI agents to control full operating systems within high-performance, lightweight virtual containers.
Ollama v0.7 (👍 272) - Ollama v0.7 introduces a new engine for first-class multimodal AI, starting with vision models like Llama 4 & Gemma 3. Offers improved reliability, accuracy, and memory management for running LLMs locally.