🧑💻 Developer-First #155 - Are VCs becoming the R&D Labs of Big Tech?
Why experienced teams, and not just tech, are driving premium acquihires.
Hello friend,
In a recent CNBC interview, Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, said it out loud:
“VCs are funding all these brilliant founders building cutting-edge tech. We watch, pick the good ones, and bring them into our team.”
That’s precisely what Palo Alto just did: acquiring Protect AI for $700 million. A startup focused on AI model security, led by a senior, proven team whose technology was already validated by large enterprise customers.
In a world where AI enables 10 new competitors to emerge overnight, the real moat is no longer the idea—or even the technology. 👉 It’s the team.
But not just any team. The most valuable ones are:
Dense in talent
Already battle-tested together
Able to build fast and sell into enterprise
That’s why some of the best exits under $100M are increasingly premium acquihires. You’re not just buying software—you’re acquiring a high-performing team that’s already in motion.
And it’s also why pre-seed and seed rounds are oversubscribed for founding teams with previous wins and cohesive execution. VCs know the IPO window is narrow, and the $500M+ exits are rare. If they want liquidity, M&A is the path, and strong teams are the currency.
Now, let's dive into last week's developer-first transactions.
💰 Market Summary - Week of May 26th, 2025
8 companies raised $660.8 million across 4 product categories in 2 countries.
Europe-based companies attracted 0% of the total funding vs 0.9% for Asia-based companies (incl. Israel) and 99.1% for North America-based companies.
Data Management 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
ClickHouse, from Palo Alto 🇺🇸 raised $350 million in Series C funding led by Khosla Ventures. ClickHouse is an open-source, column-oriented OLAP database that enables real-time analytical queries at exceptional speed and scale. (more)
Snorkel AI, from Redwood City 🇺🇸 raised $100 million in Series D funding led by Addition VC. Snorkel AI accelerates AI development by programmatically transforming manual processes into scalable, data-centric solutions. (more)
Hex, from San Francisco 🇺🇸 raised $70 million in Series C funding led by Avra Capital. Hex provides a collaborative data workspace that allows teams to explore, analyse, and share insights effortlessly. (more)
CloudZero, from Boston 🇺🇸 raised $56 million in Series C funding led by BlueCrest Capital Management and Innovius Capital. CloudZero helps engineering teams build cost-efficient software through automated cloud cost optimisation and unit economics analysis. (more)
Chalk, from San Francisco 🇺🇸 raised $50 million in Series A funding led by Felicis Ventures. Chalk is a data platform for inference, designed to help teams build and iterate AI applications faster with its feature engine. (more)
Superblocks, from New York 🇺🇸 raised $23 million in Series A funding led by Kleiner Perkins. Superblocks is an internal app generation platform empowering global enterprises to build production-grade internal tools with AI. (more)
Traceloop, from Tel Aviv 🇮🇱 raised $6.1 million in Seed funding led by Sorenson Capital and Ibex Investors. Traceloop helps teams monitor LLM applications in production, enabling anomaly detection, evaluation, and rapid deployment. (more)
Bito, from Menlo Park 🇺🇸 raised $5.7 million in Seed funding led by Vela Partners. Bito offers AI-powered code reviews that accelerate pull requests and reduce regressions by integrating directly with your existing Git workflows. (more)
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions
Informatica, from Redwood City 🇺🇸 was acquired by Salesforce for $8 billion. Informatica is a leading enterprise cloud data management company that empowers businesses to unlock the full potential of their data with AI-powered solutions. (more)
⭐️ Trending GitHub Repositories
Fosowl / agenticSeek (✩ 10,499 stars this week) - Fully Local Manus AI. No APIs, No $200 monthly bills. Enjoy an autonomous agent that thinks, browses the web, and code for the sole cost of electricity.
microsoft / qlib (✩ 3,114 stars this week) - Qlib is an AI-oriented Quant investment platform that aims to use AI tech to empower Quant Research, from exploring ideas to implementing productions.
mindsdb / mindsdb (✩ 1,878 stars this week) - AI's query engine - Platform for building AI that can answer questions over large scale federated data. - The only MCP Server you'll ever need.
👍 Trending Developer Tools on ProductHunt
OpenMemory MCP (👍 421) - OpenMemory MCP is a private memory service for MCP compatible AI tools like Cursor, Claude Desktop, and Windsurf. It lets tools store, retrieve, and share context between sessions, either locally on your machine or through a secure, hosted cloud version.
CodeRabbit VSCode Extension (👍 376) -Code, review, commit: all without leaving your IDE. CodeRabbit acts as a backstop that flags hallucination, logical errors, code smells, missed unit tests, and more.
Circuit Tracer (👍 323) - Anthropic's open-source Circuit Tracer helps researchers understand LLMs by visualising internal computations as attribution graphs. Explore on Neuronpedia or use the library. Aims for AI transparency.