We are excited to announce that our company, Dev Community Inc., has raised a new round of funding. Last year, we raised ~$950k from a group of developer-focused angel investors and funds. This new round is an $11.5M Series A led by Mayfield, with participation from a few of our previous investors such as OSS Capital and Charge VC.
We want to tell you all about the deal itself, and what this means for the future of DEV.
The structure of the deal
Partnering with an investment firm is a major decision, so we prioritized working with people that saw eye-to-eye with our values and long-term ambitions. Mayfield has a track-record of supporting open-source companies; for example, they led Hashicorp’s Series A back in 2014. We came to them with a plan that centers around supporting open source, and we’re confident that Mayfield will make great partners in this regard.
Peter, Jess, and I will maintain majority control of the board, something we feel is important at this stage to ensure the community’s interests are always put first. With that being said, finding supportive and experienced new board members was also a key factor that attracted us to working with Mayfield. With that, we are welcoming Navin Chaddha and Vivek Saraswat to fill out our board. Navin is an extremely accomplished investor and entrepreneur, and leads the entire Mayfield firm. Vivek brings super relevant experience from his time at VMWare, Docker, and Amazon (AWS). As we encounter challenges along the way, we now have these two on speed dial.
Some more details about company structure: Jess, Peter and I have not talked a lot about our specific titles, but this announcement feels like as good a time as any to provide a bit more detail. Jess serves as COO of our organization, while Peter and I act as Co-CEOs. Jess typically leads internal operations, hiring plans, and team organization. I spend most of my time on our long-term vision, product decisions, and community leadership; whereas Peter focuses more on partnerships, growth, and new opportunities. This operating arrangement reflects how we’ve come to work together for years. Jess has also taken on the duty as our representative in a newly-formed compensation committee alongside Navin. Jess and Navin will get together to have the final decision on executive salary and related items.
The DEV Business model
Now that we’ve raised a larger round of funding, it’s natural to ask questions about DEV’s business model.
We have always been proud of the fact that we have generated revenue in ways that are value-add to the community. We have a useful and unobtrusive classified listings section, ongoing high level sponsorship relations, and other community-oriented services in the works. We continue to establish healthy sponsorships that act as a truly useful community resources.
These services, however, do not represent the end game in our business model. As an open source platform, we serve the community through transparency and collaboration. Our true north star has long centered around this model, and the Series A allows us to plan years ahead in order to execute.
I wrote about that vision recently:
The most important point to understand is that we are growing our business in a way that does not rely on a massive collection of user data. Our leverage will be centered on our ability to deliver and support software that powers a more distributed and community-driven Internet — not maxing out the attention and data of individual platform users.
We look forward to enabling independent entrepreneurs, as well as large organizations, to build standalone online communities on top of the DEV open-source software. We will host and support these new communities following the models of successful commercial open-source companies such as Automattic, Hashicorp, GitLab, and others.
What else is new?
Of course, this funding opportunity comes on the heels of a year of great growth. We now serve about 5.5 million unique visitors per month, up from about 1.5 million this time last year. More than 250,000 developers have registered to our service in order to customize their experience, create content, and participate alongside the broader community.
We launched ecosystem-oriented partnerships in order to help users control their content and data more seamlessly. Some of these initiatives are launched, some continue to be in the works. We also served as co-presenters of Hacktoberfest, the world’s largest celebration of open source.
We have been hiring
We recently welcomed a few new team members — Molly, Jacob and Avery — bringing our team up to 13 people total. We are also in the midst of interviewing amazing candidates to bring on a few more team members. We hire on a cyclical basis and will be opening up a new hiring period early next year. If you are interested in becoming part of our team, we hope you keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, you are more than welcome to contribute to our open source goals via our GitHub repo.
Thank you for being part of a journey that started as a Twitter account which I registered in 2014. We promise to always put the community first and push our industry forward.
Happy coding!
Latest comments (72)
That's awesome news, congrats to the whole Dev team!! 🥳
I'm so happy and proud of you folks! Dev.to is an amazing community, big thanks to you three and everyone else playing their role!
Great job!
So happy for you all AND my favorite platform. Keep up the great work team <3
Good for you all! It's amazing to see such a great community growing. Thanks for giving a great place for dev's to come.
Congrats on your amazing growth and latest fund raising round.
I'm impressed and amazed on Dev continuous focus on providing a home for all developers over the world.
By providing something of value instead of the usual fluff that I encounter from startups.
I hope this point will stay relevant and you wont be crossing out "Don't do evil" couple years from now.
Your journey is my favourite success story. and I'm happy to be witnessing it - congrats to the Dev Team!
A sincere congrats on the funding.
I start and finish every day scrolling through the app, looking through interesting or useful-looking topics.
I will attempt to contribute to the project as first priority as soon as my programming skills are up to par.
Thank you so much for existing, and please continue to do so.
congrats team :)
That’s so awesome, congrats! 🤓
Well done! Here’s to more of the same kind of great community building that has brought so many folks here to collaborate and share. I will always support a positive environment that is kind and welcoming.
I'm excited for you. The Dev platform has been a shot in the arm for the software development community and has been driving positive change for as long as I've known about it. I wish you all much success with your future endeavours!
Congratulations to the team and of course to ourselves as community!
I'm really enjoying to be a part of this awesome community.
Having experienced investors on board is a great way to add to the team and the community.
Sometimes its hard to describe this community to someone I recommend it to because there are so many aspects of how DEV makes a difference ranging from the core values of open source and transparency over a great technology stack and foresight all the way to all this awesome content here.
CONGRATS!!! This is also a fucking huge inspiration for new developers / entrepreneurs.