Investing in developer tools is tough!
Developers are some of the most opinionated and discerning buyers out there. They don’t get easily sold on hype, and they don’t tolerate mediocre products. To build a meaningful business in this space you need to earn genuine developer trust. Even if you achieve developer trust, large deals often require management buy-in, making the go-to-market motion even trickier. The bar is simply higher.
We know this intimately as we are the largest investor in Developer Tools in Israel. Our portfolio includes Granulate (Acquired by Intel), Run:ai (Acquired by Nvidia), Port, Qodo, Firebolt, Pelanor, Ariga, Aporia (Acquired by Coralogix), Rookout (Acquired by Dynatrace), Sealights (Acquired by Tricentis), ScyllaDB and now MetalBear.
We are extremely excited to be partnering with Aviram Hassan (CEO) and Eyal Bukchin (CTO) and leading their $12.5M Seed round along side TQ Ventures, MTF, and Netz Capital, as well as prominent angel investors including David Cramer, co-founder of Sentry, and Ben Sigelman, co-creator of OpenTelemetry.
Our story with Metalbear dates back to 2022, when I first met with Aviram and Eyal. mirrord, MetalBear’s product, enables developers to run cloud tests locally. The challenges developers face when attempting to run cloud tests locally were well known to us; in fact, there is a long list of companies that have tried and failed to solve this problem. What I failed to understand at the time was that mirrord was architectured in a way that was fundamentally different to all of its predecessors. The technicalities of the product can be found here, but in short, instead of “simulating” an application-like environment to run tests, mirrord taps into real traffic from staging, triaging that traffic to the developer’s local environment, to create a realistic environment for those tests to run. No simulations, no managing infrastructure, no cloud compute costs and an extremely simple user experience for developers.
Over the following two years, we kept running into the MetalBear team and observing as mirrord started to gain traction. It struck us, that there was genuine developer love for mirrord, which was showing up in their open source and other forums. Developer love is hard to come by and only exists when products are absolutely the best of breed. Our most successful developer tool investments have early signs of developer love. In addition, with very limited resources, the company had begun monetizing with incredible success. The customers at this stage would be enviable even by companies at far more mature state.
We also began to believe that as code generation tools increasingly augment developers’ ability to write code, their workflows will shift. Instead, developers will move toward testing more frequently and iterating faster. This acceleration creates even greater demand for mirrord, which ensures these rapid changes can be tested in realistic environments without slowing the developer down.
We are honored to be a part of MetalBear’s journey and want to congratulate Aviram and Eyal on this important milestone.
