Check is a New York-based fintech that provides embedded payroll infrastructure, letting software platforms build and sell their own payroll product through a single API. It handles the hard parts - tax calculation, money movement, tax filing, and multi-state compliance - so vertical SaaS, HR, and workforce-management companies can offer payroll without becoming payroll experts. Backed by Stripe, Thrive, Bedrock and Index, Check powers payroll for platforms like Wave, Homebase, Housecall Pro and 7shifts.
Directus is an open-source data platform that wraps any SQL database with an instant REST and GraphQL API plus a no-code admin app, letting developers and non-technical users manage content and data without building a backend from scratch. Founded on a project Ben Haynes started in 2004 and incorporated as a company in 2020, Directus has surpassed 30 million downloads and is used by organizations including Adobe, Bose, Tripadvisor, AT&T and the U.S. Navy.
env0 (pronounced "env zero") is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) management and cloud governance platform that lets engineering teams run Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Kubernetes and Helm with self-service workflows, policy-as-code guardrails, cost visibility and drift detection. Founded in Israel in 2018, the company gives developers a fast, GitOps-driven way to provision cloud environments while platform and finance teams keep control over cost, security and compliance.
Formance is an open-source financial infrastructure company that gives developers a programmable core ledger and a connectivity layer for moving money across banks, payment processors, and wallets. Its stack - Ledger, Connectivity, Flows, and Reconciliation - lets fintechs and platforms track every asset movement with double-entry precision, orchestrate payments across providers, and automatically reconcile internal records against external statements. Founded in 2021 and backed by PayPal Ventures and Portage, Formance positions itself as building-block infrastructure for the 'financial internet' rather than a payment processor that touches customer funds.
Materialize is a New York-based data infrastructure company that builds a streaming SQL database. It continuously ingests data from operational systems, incrementally maintains the results of complex SQL queries as always-fresh materialized views, and serves them with low latency. Built on the open-source Timely Dataflow and Differential Dataflow engines and written in Rust, Materialize looks and behaves like Postgres, letting engineers use standard SQL to power real-time analytics, automation, personalization, fraud detection, and - more recently - a live context layer for AI agents and applications.
Stripe is a financial infrastructure company that lets businesses accept payments and run their money operations through a set of developer-friendly APIs. Founded in 2010 by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, it powers everything from indie side projects to Fortune 500 checkouts, processing more than $1.9 trillion in payments in 2025. Beyond core card processing, Stripe offers billing, fraud protection, business incorporation, card issuing, tax automation, and banking-as-a-service, positioning itself as the economic layer of the internet.
Twilio is a cloud communications company that gives software developers programmable APIs to add messaging, voice, email, video, and authentication to their applications. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in San Francisco, it has grown from a pay-as-you-go SMS and voice API into a broad customer-engagement platform that pairs those channels with Segment's customer data platform and a growing set of AI-driven tools. Twilio is publicly traded on the NYSE under the ticker TWLO and serves developers and enterprises across nearly every industry.
Coder is an Austin-based software company that moves software development off individual laptops and into secure, self-hosted cloud development environments (CDEs). Its open-source and enterprise platform uses infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) to provision standardized, governed developer workspaces that run on Kubernetes or VMs across any cloud, on-prem, or air-gapped setup. Increasingly, Coder positions itself as the control plane for enterprise AI development, where human developers and AI coding agents work inside the same governed environment. It raised a $90M Series C led by KKR in April 2026.
JetBrains is a privately held software company that builds professional developer tools used by millions of programmers worldwide. Founded in 2000 in Prague, it is best known for the IntelliJ IDEA family of integrated development environments - including PyCharm, WebStorm, Rider, GoLand and CLion - and for creating the Kotlin programming language, now Google's preferred language for Android. The company also builds team tools such as TeamCity, YouTrack and the ReSharper extension for Visual Studio, and has moved aggressively into AI with its Junie coding agent and AI Assistant. JetBrains has never taken outside funding and remains self-funded and profitable.
8090 is an AI-native software factory that helps regulated enterprises build and modernize production software using teams of people working alongside AI agents. Founded by Chamath Palihapitiya in January 2024 and headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, its flagship Software Factory platform runs the full software development lifecycle - from business intent to production code - through five modules (Refinery, Foundry, Planner, Assembler, Validator) while preserving the documentation, oversight and audit trails that regulated industries require. The company raised a $135M Series A led by Salesforce Ventures in June 2026, with Chamath stepping in as full-time CEO.
CircleCI is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that automates the build, test, and deployment of software. Founded in San Francisco in 2011, it runs tens of millions of workflows for engineering teams who want faster, more reliable pipelines without maintaining their own build infrastructure. It does not host code or track tickets - it focuses on being a fast, dependable runner of builds and, increasingly, on validating AI-generated code at scale.
Kernel is a San Francisco startup building browser infrastructure for AI agents and web automations. Its cloud browsers launch in a few hundred milliseconds, persist login state across workflows, and evade bot detection, letting developers point agents at the live web without operating their own browser fleet. Backed by Accel and Y Combinator, Kernel raised $22M and says it is used by thousands of teams building agents, including Cash App and Rye.
Vijil is a Menlo Park-based AI company building trust infrastructure for enterprise AI agents. Founded in 2023 by senior AWS leaders, its modular platform tests, defends, and continuously hardens agents so they are verifiably reliable, secure, and safe - cutting the time it takes enterprises to trust an agent from about six months to six weeks. Vijil raised $17 million in 2025 (total $23 million) and was named a Gartner Cool Vendor.
Nick Patrick is the co-founder and CEO of Radar, a New York-based location platform that provides geofencing SDKs, maps APIs and geocoding services to companies like Panera, DICK's Sporting Goods, T-Mobile and Zillow. He started Radar in 2016 with Coby Berman after meeting him at Foursquare, and has raised more than $85 million from Accel, Insight Partners, Two Sigma Ventures, Expa and Heavybit. Before Radar he was Senior Director of Product at Handy and a product manager at Foursquare and Microsoft.
Robert Brennan is co-founder and CEO of All Hands AI, the company behind OpenHands, an MIT-licensed open source platform for AI coding agents that started life in 2024 as an OpenDevin fork built in 24 hours after Cognition's Devin demo. A former Google search engineer who patented an answer-extraction algorithm shipped inside Google Search in 2013, Brennan later founded DataFire and led open source at Fairwinds before helping launch OpenHands with Xingyao Wang and Graham Neubig. The company has raised roughly $23.8M total across a $5M Menlo-led seed and an $18.8M Series A led by Madrona in November 2025.
DBOS, Inc. is a San Francisco- and Cambridge-based developer infrastructure company commercializing durable execution technology born from a joint MIT-Stanford research project led by Postgres creator Michael Stonebraker and Apache Spark creator Matei Zaharia. Its flagship open-source library, DBOS Transact, adds crash-proof workflow orchestration and built-in observability to ordinary Python and TypeScript programs by persisting application state in Postgres, so software resumes exactly where it left off after a failure - without a separate workflow server. The company pairs the library with DBOS Conductor and DBOS Cloud for managing and hosting reliable backends, AI agents, and long-running workflows.
Increase is a banking infrastructure company that gives technology companies a programmatic way to store, move, and reconcile money. Through a single set of APIs it exposes the core U.S. payment rails - ACH, wires, real-time payments, FedNow, checks, and cards - with direct network connections and transparent access to the underlying data. Founded in 2020 by Stripe's first employee Darragh Buckley and based in Bend, Oregon, Increase is self-funded, became profitable in 2025, and processes hundreds of billions of dollars in payments each year for fintechs like Ramp, Check, and Pipe.
Orama is an open-source search company building an 'answer engine' for developers - a lightweight, high-performance stack that bundles full-text, vector, and hybrid search with automatic embedding generation and built-in LLMs. Started as the open-source project Lyra and incorporated as OramaSearch Inc. in 2023 by Issac Roth and Michele Riva, its core library ships in under 2KB and runs in the browser, on servers, or at the edge. Orama powers site search and AI answers for developer platforms including nodejs.org, tanstack.com, and solidjs.org, and its OramaCore runtime packages a search engine, vector database, and LLM interface into one deployable unit.
Sensible is a developer-first platform that turns any document - PDFs, scans, emails, images - into structured, verifiable JSON. It pairs LLM-based extraction with deterministic, layout-based rules written in its own configuration language, SenseML, and ships 150+ prebuilt parsers plus confidence scores, source coordinates, and human-review workflows. Founded in 2020 and backed by Craft Ventures, Sensible is used by companies across insurance, proptech, financial services, logistics, and healthcare to automate document-heavy operations.

Swyx (Shawn Wang) and Alessio Fanelli are the co-hosts of Latent Space, the #1 AI Engineering podcast and newsletter with 200,000+ subscribers and 10M+ total readers. Swyx — a former Singapore hedge fund trader turned developer advocate who coined the term 'AI Engineer' — and Alessio — a Forbes 30 Under 30 VC partner and Rome-born dropout-turned-engineer — together define the curriculum and culture of a generation of engineers building with AI.
Canvas Medical builds programmable EMR infrastructure for the companies reinventing how care gets delivered. Its ONC-certified electronic medical record pairs a FHIR API and a Workflow SDK so clinicians and developers can extend the chart like software, then layers AI agents - led by the open-source Hyperscribe ambient copilot - that listen, document, place orders, and prep claims in real time. Founded in 2015 in San Francisco, Canvas powers primary care, behavioral health, weight loss, longevity, and other modern clinics that want their EMR to bend to their workflows instead of the other way around.
Mindee is a Paris- and San Francisco-based AI company building an API-first platform that turns any document - invoices, receipts, passports, bank statements - into clean structured JSON. Founded in 2018 and backed by GGV Capital, Alven and Y Combinator, it gives developers pre-trained OCR endpoints plus a no-training-required custom builder called docTI.
MindsDB is an open-source AI data platform that lets developers connect, unify, and query structured and unstructured data across 200+ sources using SQL and natural language - turning any database into an AI-ready system without moving data.
Rollbar is a San Francisco-based developer tools company that builds real-time error monitoring and AI-assisted debugging software. Founded in 2012 by former Lolapps engineers Brian Rue and Cory Virok, Rollbar helps engineering teams catch, group, and resolve software errors across web, mobile, and backend applications.
ngrok is developer infrastructure that puts any app, API, or AI model online with a single command. What began in 2013 as one engineer's weekend project to learn Go is now a unified ingress platform - reverse proxy, firewall, API gateway, and global load balancer rolled into one - used by more than 5 million developers and trusted by companies like GitHub, Twilio, Zoom, and HashiCorp.
Artie is a San Francisco-based, fully managed real-time data streaming platform that uses change data capture (CDC) and log-based replication to move production data across databases, warehouses, search systems, and vector stores with sub-minute latency and zero pipeline maintenance. Founded in 2023 by Jacqueline Cheong and Robin Tang and backed by Y Combinator, Artie pitches streaming-first data movement as the default for AI-era systems, replacing brittle batch ETL and self-managed Kafka.
Coiled is a lightweight cloud compute platform that lets Python users scale data science, machine learning, and AI workloads from a laptop to thousands of cloud machines without Docker or Kubernetes. Founded in 2020 by Matthew Rocklin, the creator of the open-source Dask library, Coiled runs inside a customer's own AWS, GCP, or Azure account, handling provisioning, autoscaling, environment replication, and cost visibility so data teams can run Dask clusters, serverless functions, and batch jobs with minimal friction.
Dots is a San Francisco-based global payouts infrastructure company that lets marketplaces, platforms, and service businesses pay workers, sellers, and creators anywhere through a single end-to-end API. One integration unifies bank transfers, PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, and stablecoins, and bundles recipient onboarding, KYC/anti-fraud, and tax form collection so platforms can move money to over 1 million payees across 190+ countries without building payment rails themselves.
Nextmv is a DecisionOps platform that gives developers and operations-research teams the tooling to build, test, deploy, monitor, and govern optimization and decision models - things like vehicle routing, scheduling, and packing. It treats decision models the way DevOps treats software: version control, CI/CD, scenario testing, shadow production tests, and a system of record for every decision. Founded in 2019 by ex-Grubhub engineers Carolyn Mooney and Ryan O'Neil, the company raised an $8M Series A led by FirstMark Capital and was acquired by FICO in May 2026.
OpenNode is a Bitcoin payment processor and infrastructure provider that lets businesses accept Bitcoin and send payouts globally, settling instantly over the Lightning Network with automatic conversion to local currencies. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Los Angeles, the company powers checkout, payouts, in-person payments and a developer API for merchants ranging from McDonald's El Salvador to Substack, charging a flat 1% fee with built-in chargeback protection.