developer tools

Supernova wants to make it easy to move design elements to code bases • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in design, developer tools, Enterprise, Supernova, wing venture capitalNo Comments

As companies increasingly turn to tools like Figma to design their software, moving the design elements like color schemes from the design tool to your code base can be a time-consuming and manual process. Supernova is an early-stage startup that wants to make it easier by acting as a bridge between your design team and your development team, making it easy to change design pieces in an automated way. Today the Y Combinator graduates announced a $4.8 million seed round. “The idea for Supernova comes from the discrepancy between designers and developers. There is, I think, sort of a communication block between them. Also, the design and developer worlds are quite disconnected from each other, and so any kind of thing that you can do to help designers and developers work better together actually goes a long way, and that’s especially true in larger organizations,” company CEO and co-founder Jiri Trecak told ZebethMedia. The software acts as a bridge of sorts, connecting your different tools and design repositories with your coding tools to facilitate the connection between all of these tools at scale. What’s more, if you have a particularly complex workflow, you can build custom apps or scripts on top of Supernova to extend the tooling even further, Trecak explained. He says an easy way to understand how this works is to imagine you have a brand like Spotify and you need to change the color of your logo from the familiar green to a new color. An undertaking like this would take months to do manually, but with Supernova, you just change your color scheme in your design tooling and run the scripts, and it will cascade across the entire code base, changing the colors automatically. He said it can work across multiple design tools and Supernova will still move the changes regardless. He started the company in the Czech Republic in 2018 and became the first startup from that country to be accepted into Y Combinator in the winter of 2019. Today, Trecak runs the company out of San Francisco, and the company launched the current iteration of the product last year. The engineering team remains in the Czech Republic. They have built up a user base of over 1,000 customers, several dozen of whom are large enterprise users. The company currently has about 30 people, with plans to increase that number with the new funding. As he grows the company, Trecak says that he is very much focused on building a diverse employee base and currently has employees who represent eight or nine different nationalities. “This is something that is very much our focus. We have been trying to be quite diligent about this and we will try to be even more so as we go to the U.S. market,” he said. Today’s funding was led by Wing Venture Capital with participation from EQT Ventures and Kaya VC, along with several prominent industry angels.

Directus wants to democratize data across the enterprise • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in data management, developer tools, Enterprise, Startups, True VenturesNo Comments

A startup that wants to democratize data in the enterprise? That may sound awfully familiar, but Directus, which is announcing a $7 million Series A round led by True Ventures today, is taking a different approach to most of its competitors by combining traditional developer tools with a no-code approach to offer a highly flexible open-source data platform for its enterprise users. Using the service’s tools, developers can easily turn any SQL database into an API to power their apps — or use the service’s no-code tools to build apps that way, too. Even though it only launched in 2020, the New York-based remote-first company has already added enterprises like Bose, Adobe and Tripadvisor to its roster of paying customers. And while the company itself is only a couple of years old now, Directus CEO and cofounder Ben Haynes actually started toying with the ideas that led to launching Directus as early as 2004 after leaving the Air Force and starting a web consultancy business. Image Credits: Directus “What I identified was that there’s a lot of repetition in the engineering being done — the authentication and authorization, the connectivity, the database, the data access, caching,” Haynes explained. “That’s all for building the deliverable, but once you hand that off, you need a way to manage it.” At the time, that mostly involved a CMS like WordPress or maybe Drupal and database administration tools for the LAMP stack like phpMyAdmin. But there weren’t any great tools for building out the information architecture for new projects, so Haynes ended up coding the first versions of what would become Directus himself. And while he kept working on it as a side project during stints at SoulCyle and AOL, it only became a full-time job and a startup in 2020 when he and his co-founder Rijk van Zanten started getting more serious inquiries for this tool that they had previously only used in their consultancy business. Today’s Directus is obviously not a PHP app anymore. It’s been completely rewritten and sits on top of a modern Jamstack platform. Directus co-founders Ben Haynes (l.) and Rijk van Zanten (r.). Maybe the best way to describe the Directus users experience today is as a mix of a code-centric database management tool and the service’s Airtable-like Directus Studio no-code tool. As Haynes stressed, the company isn’t in the business of managing the databases themselves. Instead, it can sit on top of any SQL database. “The database is not part of our platform,” he noted. “That is your data. You have authority. We layer on a database administrator administration tool. We try to provide tools and a portal into that database, for your schema, your optimizations, your foreign key constraints — whatever you’ve optimized, that remains completely untouched. We don’t commingle any of our system data. If you delete our software, six months or six years later, it’s completely pristine.” And while business users can use the service, too, the core audience — even for the no-code/low-code tool, is developers. “We remain exclusively focused on the developer as our ideal customer profile. We are talking and working with developers,” Haynes said. He argued that services like Retool or Airtable are no-code platforms first that then try to backfill the technology. “You end up with a band aid — a stopgap solution that maybe developers aren’t going to be happy with when it needs to scale,” he said. “We are database first, then API, then the connectivity, and then no-code.” This developer focus is also exemplified by the fact that the service offers REST and GraphQL APIs to connect to its service, on top of a command line interface and a JavaScript SDK. Image Credits: Directus For developers, this means they get a lot of flexibility in how they want to use the tool and manipulate their data (no matter whether that’s text, images or geographic data). The tool is available as open-source as well as a freemium fully-managed service with prices for the paid tiers starting at $25/month. The company now has 25 employees and has raised a total of $8.5 million. In addition to True Ventures leading this Series A round, Handshake Ventures also participated. “Empowering non-technical users with no-code tools is a massive shift underway in the corporate world,” said True Ventures Co-founder Phil Black, who will join the Directus Board of Directors. “Directus is an open-source project that has been downloaded over 20 million times in less than a year. Among many benefits, the software helps teams greatly reduce the hours developers might spend creating data-driven projects. What’s more, we like how the founding team spent time deep in this problem prior to starting Directus. Hands-on struggle begets innovation.”

Xata gives Jamstack developers access to a serverless data platform with an API call • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in developer tools, Enterprise, JAMstack, Monica Sarbu, Postgres, XataNo Comments

A couple of years ago, Xata founder Monica Sarbu was putting together a passion project called Tupo.io, a platform she was building to help women in tech find mentors. She wanted to include a Postgres database with Elastic search in the Tupo web application, and as a side project, she wanted it to be fairly self-sufficient because volunteers were helping to build and run the site. As she looked for a serverless database, she realized that there was nothing really out there that met her requirements, and like any good entrepreneur, she started building it. That project would become Xata, a serverless data platofrm that is generally available starting today. The platform is built from from several open source components including a Postgres database with Kafka for data streaming and Elastic for search. Web application developers, particularly those building Jamstack applications, can simply connect to it through an API and they are good to go. “What we’ve done is build this data platform for you, so you don’t have to hire a team of developers internally to work on building a data platform. Instead, we built this for you and offer it as a service, and you can access everything you need over an API,” Sarbu told ZebethMedia. She says that companies like Netlify and Vercel have made it simple to build and launch a Jamstack web application in production, but what’s been missing is a simple way to connect to a data platform, a hole that Xata is attempting to fill. “Unfortunately, what’s missing is the data part. There isn’t really a way to preview and test your data before merging into production. So we want to complete this workflow and offer the best experience for web developers,” she said. Today, developers typically create this kind of data platform from scratch every time, and the idea with Xata is to have this serverless data platform that reduces all of the complexity related to building it yourself. Sarbu says this lets companies and development teams do more with less, a goal of every organization, especially in today’s economic climate. But more than that, they can also put those limited resources to work building the best application, rather than fiddling with the data stack components. “There is such a shortage of talent on the market, and everyone is fighting for the few developers. My philosophy is that companies need to build more with less resources. They need to concentrate on building the features that matter for their product, rather than building the [data stack]” she said. Xata has been in beta, but starting today, it will be generally available to all developers to use. The product includes a free tier to get started with a small project in production, and as the product grows companies can shift to pay plans. Prior to launching Xata and Tupo.io, Sarbu co-founded a monitoring company called Packetbeat, which was acquired by Elastic in 2015. She launched Xata last year and has raised $35 million, per Crunchbase.