🧑💻 Developer-First #161 - Europe's largest IT Services firm isn’t a company
How tech startups can turn millions of freelancers into a secret go-to-market weapon.
Hello friend,
In Europe, selling software, whether to SMBs or large enterprises, almost always requires going through IT service providers. From recommending tools to integrating and scaling them across organisations, they are the key intermediaries in the buying process.
But there’s one “company” most startups overlook entirely. It employs more consultants than any consulting firm, is present in every vertical and enterprise, and is not even a company…
It’s Freelance Corp.
In France alone, 1 to 1.5 million freelance developers and IT consultants operate across every industry. They’re embedded in delivery teams, close to technical decisions, and often more trusted than internal staff. Their influence on software selection and implementation is real and growing.
Yet, for most startups selling to developers or IT teams, this channel is completely ignored. There are:
No developer relations programs explicitly designed for freelancers;
No structured ambassador initiatives to empower them as advocates;
Little to no content, tools or visibility offered to those deploying their product.
And that’s a missed opportunity. If you’re building a DevTool, an infra product, or anything adopted bottom-up, the freelance ecosystem could become your most scalable distribution channel.
What can you do?
✅ Give them visibility when they implement your product successfully
✅ Celebrate their work on client projects
✅ Offer them insider access, tools, and a chance to become certified ambassadors
✅ Help them win new clients by mastering your solution
In a world where trust and peer recommendations matter more than cold outbound, freelancers could be your ultimate growth lever, as long as you build for them.
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Now, let's dive into last week's developer-first transactions.
💰 Market Summary - Week of July 7th, 2025
7 companies raised $120.1 million across 5 product categories in 4 countries.
Europe-based companies attracted 8.4% of the total funding vs 16.7% for Asia-based companies (incl. Israel) and 74.9% for North America-based companies.
DevOps is the category that attracted the highest funding.
1 company provides or contributes to an open-source product.
2 companies were acquired last week.
📈 Top 5 Weekly Share Price Movement
🧩 Funding by Product Category
🌎 Funding by Region
🏢 Funding By Company
Spacelift, from Redwood City 🇺🇸 raised $51 million in Series C funding led by Five Elms Capital. Spacelift is an infrastructure orchestration platform that manages the entire infrastructure lifecycle across popular IaC tools. (more)
Vellum, from New York 🇺🇸 raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Leaders Fund. Vellum enables teams to build and ship reliable AI solutions using test-driven development. (more)
Datafy, from Tel Aviv 🇮🇱 raised $20 million in Seed funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Datafy helps companies reduce cloud storage costs through self-optimising, developer-independent storage management. (more)
Augmentus, from Austin 🇺🇸 raised $11 million in Series A funding led by Woori Ventures. Augmentus simplifies robot vision and motion programming with a no-code, graphical interface. (more)
Cerebrium, from London 🇬🇧 raised $8.5 million in Seed funding led by Gradient Ventures. Cerebrium deploys machine learning models on serverless GPUs with sub-5 second cold starts and 40% cost savings. (more)
Ryft, from New York 🇺🇸 raised $8 million in Seed funding led by Index Ventures. Ryft automates Iceberg table optimisation and governance, powering secure and cost-efficient lakehouses. (more)
OllyGarden, from Berlin 🇩🇪 raised $1.6 million in Pre-Seed funding led by Dig Ventures. OllyGarden helps observability teams optimise telemetry pipelines through deep meta-analysis. (more)
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions
Windsurf, from Mountain View 🇺🇸 was acquired by Google for $2.4 billion. Windsurf, formerly known as Codeium, is the company behind Windsurf Editor—the first agentic IDE—aiming to revolutionize software development through AI-powered tools. (more)
NuxtLabs, from Bordeaux 🇫🇷 was acquired by Vercel. NuxtLabs is the team behind Nuxt, the popular open-source Vue framework, along with a suite of developer-first tools including Nuxt DevTools, Nuxt Content, and Nuxt UI. (more)
⭐️ Trending GitHub Repositories
googleapis / genai-toolbox (✩ 4,422 stars this week) - MCP Toolbox for Databases is an open source MCP server for databases.
rustfs / rustfs (✩ 3,362 stars this week) - 🚀 High-performance distributed object storage for MinIO alternative.
humanlayer / 12-factor-agents (✩ 2,554 stars this week) - What are the principles we can use to build LLM-powered software that is actually good enough to put in the hands of production customers?
👍 Trending Developer Tools on ProductHunt
Intervo (👍 611) - Intervo is the open-source platform for creating sophisticated phone call, voice and chat AI agents. Go beyond the limitations of closed platforms like ChatBase and Retell.AI to instantly assist customers qualify leads, handle support and do a whole lot more!
TensorBlock Forge (👍 543) - Forge is the fast, secure way to connect and run AI models across providers—no more fragmented tools or infrastructure headaches. Just 3 lines of code to switch. OpenAI-compatible. Privacy-first.
Tile (👍 527) - Build and ship App Store ready mobile apps with AI agents. Design visually with full control. Agents handle auth, payments, CMS & more. Tile gives you full-code output and built-in infra so you can launch real apps, fast, without DevOps.