Developer – Page 2 – Product Management Confabulation

December 6, 2022

ClickHouse launches ClickHouse Cloud, extends its Series B

Since its launch as an open-source project by Yandex in 2016, ClickHouse has become one of the leading databases for online analytical processing (OLAP), allowing businesses to quickly generate ad-hoc reports over very large datasets. In 2021, Yandex spun off ClickHouse into its own company and joined an initial $50 million Series A funding round led by Index Ventures and Benchmark Capital. Two months later, Coatue and Altimeter led the company’s Series B round, with participation from Index Ventures, Benchmark, Lightspeed and Redpoint. Now, ClickHouse is extending this round with fresh capital from Thrive Capital.

The company, which is headquartered in San Francisco and has a European engineering base in Amsterdam, did not disclose the exact size of Thrive’s investment, but ClickHouse CEO Aaron Katz stated that it was an “eight-figure round”.

“ClickHouse offers the most efficient database for fast and large-scale analytics,” said Avery KIemmer, an investor at Thrive Capital. “We have long admired this team, and are excited to partner with them as they launch ClickHouse Cloud to an even wider audience.”

In addition to announcing the new funding, the company also today launched ClickHouse Cloud, a fully managed, SOC 2 Type 2-compliant cloud-hosted version of its database that is now available in the AWS Marketplace. Support for Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft’s Azure cloud is in the works. The company first launched this service into beta a few months ago and is now ready to launch it into GA.

Image Credits: ClickHouse

Maybe because of its origins within Yandex, ClickHouse has flown a bit under the press’ radar, but it’s currently in use by the likes of Cloudflare, Uber, eBay, Comcast and Cisco. It’s also very hard to have a conversation about databases and analytics these days without the company being referenced in some form or another.

To run ClickHouse, Yandex brought on former Elastic CRO and Salesforce exec Aaron Katz as the company’s co-founder and CEO. Unlike other open-source companies, the ClickHouse team decided to skip past launching enterprise versions or go for an open-core model with proprietary features and skip right to a cloud-hosed version. Katz explained that this decision was based on the previous experience of the founding team.

“Trying to develop both on-premise software and sell support and stand up an enterprise-grade cloud service can be challenging to do simultaneously,” he said. “We believe the future is in managed services: serverless cloud offerings that are cloud agnostic and multi-cloud — that are secure and reliable and scalable, resource efficient and highly performant. So we developed ClickHouse Cloud and we launched it earlier this year as a beta state and got overwhelmingly positive response from the market.”

In October, ClickHouse acquired Arctype, a cross-platform GUI for managing and querying databases (think a modern phpMyAdmin). Arctype itself only launched half a year before that, so ClickHouse moved quickly here and as Katz noted, with a full war chest, we’ll likely see the company make more of these smaller acquisitions in the future. The team has now re-written Arctype as a native offering inside of ClickHouse Cloud.

Image Credits: ClickHouse

As ClickHouse VP of Product Tanaya Bragin noted, the company also tuned the software to increase performance and added a lower pricing tier for developers who want to get started with the service (after a free 30-day trial). And because there is still a talent crunch for database experts, ClickHouse is also launching ClickHouse Academy with a catalog of free courses and recordings of its own onboarding workshops.

Bragin also stressed that current users of the ClickHouse open-source version will be able to easily migrate to ClickHouse Cloud. From the application’s perspective, the two versions are equivalent. The advantage of the hosted version, of course, is that users won’t have to manage a complex database system themselves. The system will automatically handle sharding, replication and upgrading. Auto-scaling, too, is built into ClickHouse Cloud. “The separation of storage and compute is an important accomplishment that the customers benefit from, which makes it more resource efficient and cost effective than running it on your own,” Katz added.

The ClickHouse team plans to use the new funding on expanding its product and engineering teams. Given its focus on product-led growth (PLG), the company doesn’t plan to focus too much on expanding its marketing efforts for the time being.

“We’re really pursuing this PLG distribution model, where you can go to ClickHouse Cloud today, you can create your own free trial and we give you free credits,” Katz said. “It’s totally frictionless. You never have to talk to anybody and sales. You can evaluate the service on your own. If you like what your experiencing, you can add your credit card and pay as you go monthly with totally transparent, consumption-based billing. If we get that right — and the feedback from these early 100+ customers has been very encouraging. Then we won’t need to have a really expensive sales and marketing engine, because with the PLG motion, the product will distribute itself.”

ClickHouse launches ClickHouse Cloud, extends its Series B by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

December 6, 2022

ClickHouse launches ClickHouse Cloud, extends its Series B

Image Credits: ClickHouse

ClickHouse launches ClickHouse Cloud, extends its Series B by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

December 1, 2022

Amazon announces Eventbridge Pipes, a simpler way to connect events from multiple services

As developers use multiple Amazon services to compose an application, they typically have to write glue code to communicate between the different services, which can be a time-consuming manual exercise. But today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced an easier way to connect AWS services called Amazon Eventbridge Pipes.

Werner Vogels, chief technology officer at Amazon introduced the new feature today at his keynote address, saying it brings the simplicity of pipes to the process. “So many of our customers who want to actually build these sort of connections between different services, have to write a little glue code. And as always, I kept thinking why can’t we just use the pipes principle here? So I’m happy to announce today, Eventbridge Pipes, which allow you to easily stitch AWS services together,” he said.

It’s highly flexible, allowing developers to use a lambda function or an API, or whatever they are using to manipulate the date inside the pipe before it reaches the consumer. “So the idea is that you should no longer have to to write the glue code because you can easily stitch these services together. And if you would want to actually manipulate the events before they reach the consumer, you can actually provide a lambda function or a point-to-step function or API gateway to actually run some code to manipulate the events that are flowing through your pipe,” he explained

As the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new feature, “With Amazon EventBridge Pipes, you can integrate supported AWS and self-managed services as event producers and event consumers into your application in a simple, reliable, consistent and cost-effective way.”

Eventbridge Pipes is now generally available in all regions, accord to AWS.

Amazon announces Eventbridge Pipes, a simpler way to connect events from multiple services by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

November 30, 2022

Pangea Cyber wants to simplify security for developers with an API approach

When developers are creating a new application, they may build security features over time or take advantage of commercial offerings or open source libraries to implement certain security functions such as authentication or secrets management. Pangea Cyber wants to change that with an API-driven approach to adding security to an application, making it as easy as adding a few lines of code.

The company’s approach has attracted a fair bit of investor attention with over $50 million raised since it launched last year, an amazing amount of funding in a short amount of time, especially in the current funding environment. The latest round is a $26 million Series B.

Company co-founder and CEO Oliver Friedrichs says they decided to offer a security service for developers in the same way that Stripe offers payment services or Twilio offers communications.

“We’re calling this SPaaS. So essentially Security Platform as a Service, where we’re going to be providing dozens of different security building blocks that are all API-driven that developers can easily embed in their applications,” Friedrichs told TechCrunch.

The services start with authentication and authorization as basic building blocks, but then include more sophisticated elements like logging, scanning files for malicious activity, storing secrets and so forth.

“There’s a lot of things that applications need that are securely related. And right now they’re scattered across many open source and a fragmented list of commercial offerings. We’re looking to provide them all in one place,” he said.

There are developer-oriented pieces like Auth0 (acquired by Okta in 2021) providing authorization or HashiCorp providing secrets management, but there hasn’t been this hub of security services aimed specifically at developers, Friedrichs says.

And he believes that developer focus is what separates his company from the pack. “That’s really where this developer-first delivery model is important and unique, and it doesn’t really exist. For decades now, we have built all these traditional shrink-wrapped products for end users across the entire security industry, but we haven’t built things that are API only or API first that can be plugged in by developers,” he said.

The company already has 40 employees as it attacks this problem, and with multiple startups including Phantom Cyber behind him, Friedrichs has deep experience in building companies. He says, even with the economic downturn, he believes his company will thrive.

“Cybersecurity is one of those sectors that’s always resilient and always needed. While there’s a correction in valuations, we rarely see people removing cybersecurity. In fact, it continues to grow and evolve,” he said.

He says as he grows the company, diversity is a big priority for him, but even with all his experience as a founder, it remains challenging. “We focus on it deliberately across the management team and across our recruiting team. We have a full time recruiter in-house, which is unusual for this early stage, as well as outside resources, and we have conscious conversations around it,” he said.

“Now. Is it easy? It’s not easy, right? Despite how hard you try, you can’t always meet those goals. But we are trying and I think that step number one is to make sure that that’s an objective that we do want to meet, [while understanding that] we can always do better.”

Today’s $26 million Series B investment was led by GV with participation from Decibel and Okta Ventures along with existing investors Ballistic Ventures and SYN Ventures. The company has now raised a total of $52 million. Okta’s participation is noteworthy, because as previously noted, it acquired a developer-driven authorization piece in Auth0.

Pangea Cyber wants to simplify security for developers with an API approach by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

October 27, 2022

Google Cloud gets into web3 act with managed blockchain node service

Five years ago the blockchain was blossoming in the enterprise, or so many companies had us believe. Back then, companies like SAP and IBM were trying to build blockchain practices, but while the technology sounded good to solve myriad problems in the enterprise, it never really took off.

Fast forward to 2022 and the blockchain comes under a new guise with the name web3 as an umbrella term and lots of VC money behind it. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the cloud platform companies want to get into the act.

To that end, Google Cloud announced today that it’s launching Blockchain Node Engine, which it’s billing as “a fully managed node-hosting for web3 development.” Earlier this year, the company announced that it was launching a new team dedicated to digital assets, and this tool is part of what has come out of that team’s work.

In a blog post announcing the new service from Amit Zavery, GM and VP of engineering and platform and James Tromans, director of cloud web3, the two wrote that blockchain nodes have to work hard, constantly exchanging the most recent blockchain data, so that all nodes stay in sync. It’s a data- and resource-intensive process.

Google Cloud hopes to make it easier by offering a managed service to handle node creation, while providing a secure development environment in a fully managed product. From Google’s perspective, it’s a heck of a lot easier to let them do the heavy lifting while you concentrate on building your web3 application.

In the pair’s own words, “While self-managed nodes are often difficult to deploy and require constant management, Blockchain Node Engine is a fully managed node-hosting service that minimizes the need for node operations. web3 companies who require dedicated nodes can relay transactions, deploy smart contracts and read or write blockchain data with the reliability, performance and security they expect from Google Cloud compute and network infrastructure,” they wrote in the post.

This is nuts and bolts stuff, helping companies to set up a node on supported blockchains and then managing it for the user, so they don’t have to worry about all the management overhead involved. For starters, the company will support Ethereum blockchain, so developers deploying nodes on Ethereum could do it themselves or pay Google to do much of that work for them. Presumably there will be other supported blockchains in the future.

While it may feel like a pure crypto play, Tromans says the service is ultimately agnostic and developers can build anything they wish. “We are building foundational primitives to help developers innovate more quickly. Accordingly, Blockchain Node Engine is focused towards [multiple] developer use cases: smart contract development, reading from and writing to the blockchain, etc. How different developers use their fully managed, dedicated blockchain node engine infrastructure will be dependent on their individual use cases,” Tromans told TechCrunch.

The product is available starting today in private preview.

Google Cloud gets into web3 act with managed blockchain node service by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

September 30, 2022

TestGrid is a “one-stop shop” for testing apps at scale

Created by developer who needed to test apps at scale, TestGrid is an on-demand platform that lets users run tests on websites and apps across browsers, operating systems. The startup, which is launching today and can be used on premise or in the cloud, alleviates the hassle of finding and scaling physical and cloud infrastructure for testing. Its clients range in size from startups to Fortune 500 companies, and come from a wide variety of sectors, like banking, financial services and insurance, e-commerce, manufacturing, logistics and healthcare.

TestGrid was created in 2016 as a scriptless automation tool, and then over the next five years its team, led by founder and CEO Harry Rao, fleshed it out with a real device cloud, end-to-end testing platform and test management, to create a “one-stop shop for all testing needs.” It now has over 20,000 on its public cloud, which offers 200 minutes of testing time per month for free, as well as 50 enterprise customers ranging in size from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

Before founding TestGrid, Rao said he built many mobile apps and websites for companies, and needed to test them at scale, in an affordable way, across iOS and Android devices, and different browser combinations.

“We know the solution for this was first step automating the applications and then step two was running it on different form factors,” he said. “We started shopping around and found that even to automate, we needed developers and on top of it we had to integrate a bunch of tools to get the end-to-end software development lifecycle (SDLC) automations we were looking for.”

To solve this problem, TestGrid’s team started with AI-based low-code automation tech. But as they grow, the found that many infrastructure providers were too expensive. As a result, they decided to create an in-house solution and boot strap it.

TestGrid currently helps developers test things like their user interface on different device and browser combinations, app and website performance metrics like battery drainage, CPU usage, data usage, time for first byte and transaction time to go to the next page, integration testing to see if the UI and API are in sync and security vulnerabilities.

Rao gave a couple case studies of how TestGrid has helped clients. The first is a gas and electric company that needed to respond to wildfires in California using iPad devices. Real-time data feeds and IoT reporting were important to make sure they were prepared, but their app kept crashing. As a result, they needed to optimize their entire software architecture. TestGrid allowed them to shift their entire testing infrastructure to the cloud, enabling all team members around the world to have access to test devices. They were also able to move all of their Appium Java test cases into a scriptless environment. In addition to testing, the gas and electric company was also able to monitor the performance of its app, saving at least 40% of the testing cost, said Rao.

The second example is a large clothing e-commerce company that was experiencing data logging errors, glitches and slow loading pages on their app, slowing down sales and negatively affecting customer experience. Since they had multiple apps running geo-localized versions around the world, the company had to make sure that their development team could keep track of all feedback and development cycles. To do that, they used TestGrid’s in-sprint automation, which has simple keyword based test-writing environments, intelligent element extraction and auto-healing test cases. As a result, they were able to test their entire app ecosystem and get real-time insights into their performance metrics, with device, network and app logs.

Rao said TestGrid considers LambdaTest, BrowserStack and Kobiton as competitors. TestGrid differentiates by offering all its testing features—including cross-browser, mobile app, performance, API and security testing under the same umbrella, at less cost.

“We help users reduce their testing budget by cutting down on different platforms and just subscribing to the TestGrid platform alone and that no other testing platform does,” Rao said.

TestGrid is currently bootstrapped and EBITDA positive. It plans to add more solutions to its product suite, including database testing, UAT and integrations with SDLC tools.

What are the new must-hit startup metrics?

TestGrid is a “one-stop shop” for testing apps at scale by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

September 29, 2022

Airplane lands $32M in new cash to make it easier for companies to build internal dev tools

Software-as-a-service dev platform Airplane today closed a $32 million Series B funding round led by Thrive Capital with participation from Benchmark, bringing the startup’s total raised to $40.5 million. Ravi Parikh says that the new funds will be put toward growing Airplane’s 19-person team while expanding its product to new markets.

Airplane was founded in 2020 by Parikh and Josh Ma, who was formerly the CTO at Benchling, a cloud-based platform for biotechnology R&D. Parikh previously co-founded analytics startup Heap, which offers tools to analyze customer journeys online. Parikh and Ma left their respective companies in 2020 after realizing that one of the biggest challenges in software development is a lack of internal tooling.

It wasn’t just a hunch on their parts. According to one recent vendor survey, developers spent more than 30% of their time building internal apps in 2021. The pandemic worsened matters, with 87% of respondents saying that they increased or maintained their time spent on internal apps in response to the health crises.

“[We’ve spoken] to tons of engineers who spend 25% to 50% of their time responding to customer requests, building and maintaining internal admin panels, maintaining cron jobs, on-call runbooks and more instead of pushing the product forward … At Heap, we had tons of one-off customer requests, like deleting data, merging accounts, GDPR operations and billing operations,” Parikh said. “We created Airplane to make it easy to take these one-off engineering operations and turn them into tools anyone at a company can use.”

Building an app using Airplane. Image Credits: Airplane

Parikh acknowledges there are platforms already addressing these internal tooling challenges, like Retool and Superblocks — both of which recently secured tens of millions in venture capital backing. But he argues that Airplane is more developer-centric and “code-first,” eschewing a low-code, drag-and-drop approach to creating apps for more specialized tools and workflows.

With Airplane, developers can select from a library of tables, forms, charts and more to built apps, which can be integrated with APIs and custom components or libraries. The platform supports databases and messaging platforms out of the box and can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, giving devs the raw tools to launch apps like billing dashboards and content moderation queues.

Airplane today launched Airplane Views, a framework for creating internal tooling visual interfaces. Airplane was previously focused on code-heavy internal apps for tasks like deleting user data, refunding a charge and banning a user. But Airplane Views allows developers to create app components that act like dashboards, for example to display certain key metrics.

“One of the most common use cases is software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies using Airplane Views to build internal admin panels for their customer success and support teams. SaaS companies use Airplane to create [interfaces] where they can look up customer data, view account metrics and make account changes like suspending users or upgrading a customer’s account,” Parikh said. “Another important use case is fraud detection … [W]ith Views, companies can build more sophisticated fraud monitoring [interfaces] where the right user data is displayed contextually next to these operations, making the lives of ops and risk teams significantly easier when using Airplane.”

Eric Vishria, a general partner at Benchmark who recently joined Airplane’s board of directors, highlighted what he sees as the other benefits of the platform, such as controls that allow engineers to grant access to data deletion requests to anyone in a business. In theory, these minimize the need for engineers to get involved with every such request — removing a common bottleneck.

Image Credits: Airplane

“Today, virtually every company runs a software service,” Vishria said via email. “Disney used to make content, now it also has to run Disney+. Banks used to store money, now they compete on their apps. Every one of these cloud services has an unmanaged mountain of scripts, cron jobs, SQL statements and internal dashboards that keep it running. Airplane is the first company taking a developer-first approach to bringing order to this 50% of ‘code’ that lives in the wilderness today.”

Parikh cautions that it’s early days; he declined to share revenue metrics. But he revealed that Airplane has almost 100 paying customers currently, including startups Vercel, Panther Labs and Flatfile.

“We’re not yet profitable, but this funding round plus our current revenue gives us several years of runway even with aggressive growth plans … We’re fortunate to have a product that can save a lot of engineering time as well as significantly improve customer experience. During a period when companies are tightening their belts and looking for ways to improve efficiency, Airplane is easy to justify,” Parikh said with confidence. “[But] our product today only solves a small portion of this huge problem and there’s a lot more we need to build to create a broad platform for internal tool development.”

Airplane lands $32M in new cash to make it easier for companies to build internal dev tools by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

September 20, 2022

LibreOffice begins charging Mac App Store users $8.99

LibreOffice, the popular open source document processing suite, has begun charging users who download the software through the Mac App Store a one-time fee of $8.99. First spotted by The Register, it’s an unexpected step for The Document Foundation (TDF) — the organization behind LibreOffice — which since its inception has made all versions of LibreOffice available at no charge.

In a blog post, Italo Vignoli, head of marketing and public relations at LibreOffice, said that the change was reflective of a “new marketing strategy” where TDF will focus on releasing free, community versions of LibreOffice while “ecosystem companies” develop “value-added” releases targeted at enterprise customers. The LibreOffice client on the Mac App Store falls into this latter category because it’s not based on the same source code as the base LibreOffice project, Vignoli says, and was maintained by U.K.-based software consultancy Collabora. (LibreOffice on the Mac App Store doesn’t include Java because external dependencies aren’t allowed on the store.)

The objective is to draw a clearer distinction between LibreOffice clients backed by professional services and community releases that are supported by volunteers, Vignoli added. “We are grateful to Collabora for having supported LibreOffice on Apple’s Mac App Stores for quite a long time,” Vignoli said. “The objective is to fulfill the needs of individual and enterprise users in a better way, although we know that the positive effects of the change will not be visible for some time. Educating enterprises about [free and open source software] is not a trivial task and we have just started our journey in this direction.”

It’s unclear whether Collabora or another developer will take charge of maintaining the version of LibreOffice hosted on the Mac App Store; The Register notes that Collabora previously charged $10 for “LibreOffice Vanilla” with three years of support. When contacted for comment, Collabora productivity general manager Michael Meeks implied that TDF would lead the charge going forward:

“Recently, TDF have got around to distributing LibreOffice themselves on the Mac App Store, and (it is to be hoped) should re-invest the proceeds in developing LibreOffice themselves — although there’s quite a complex picture around that,” he said via email. “In terms of financial arrangements, when we created LibreOffice Vanilla, we decided to donate 10% of our revenue to TDF to ensure that there was no financial loss from missed donations there. We also donated 10% of Collabora Office revenues, and when the Apple app-store reduced its commission rate, we increased that, too.”

In any case, Vignoli was quick to note that LibreOffice will remain free for MacOS — just not through the Mac App Store. Users have to take the extra step of downloading the release from the LibreOffice website, forgoing App Store features such as automatic updates and account management.

The newly-implemented charge might still strike some as consumer-hostile. But it costs $100 per year to publish apps on the App Store, with Apple taking a 30% cut of sales, and loads of open source projects have commercial flavors as their licenses don’t prevent developers from creating paid apps. For example, the open source painting programs Paint.NET and Krita are available for free from the projects’ websites but charge for downloads through the Microsoft Store — the proceeds from which go toward development and support.

LibreOffice begins charging Mac App Store users $8.99 by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

September 15, 2022

Sendbird adds livestreaming from any app to communications platform

Sendbird, a communications startup, has been around since 2013 helping customers incorporate communications capabilities into their applications via an API. Today, the company announced that moving forward, you can also add livestreaming combined with chat to your application with a couple of lines of code.

This new capability is called Sendbird Live.

“Now we want to give businesses the super power to host livestreaming, plus community chat as part of your user experience, all branded within their native application. So users don’t have to bounce off and go to some third-party media. And also brands can keep their users on their platform, while providing novel experiences,” Sendbird CEO and co-founder John Kim told TechCrunch.

Kim says that this allows developers to mix and match chat, livestreaming and content moderation in different ways to create safe and engaging experiences from a single tool.

“Before introducing Sendbird Live we saw a lot of our customers pick a streaming vendor, but they would always come to us for adding chat and moderation capabilities. What they really want is a single one-stop solution that they can just drop in and have all these capabilities go live instantaneously and that’s why we decided to build Sendbird Live,” he said.

Kim says the livestreaming piece fits when you want to present something in a live context, while having a chat with your audience. This could be a sporting event, a concert, a fitness class or a business town hall meeting, as some examples.

Sid Suri, head of marketing at Sendbird, says this has the potential to increase interactions around an online streaming event. “What’s interesting about our product too is if you think about a watch party use case, you might have a live session, but you can also quickly set up breakout rooms with a group of friends or colleagues,” Suri said.

“So it’s very easy to create these multiple sessions where there’s the main session of computers streaming whatever you’re watching, but also creating these sub-channels with your private groups, where you can also have a private chat, and also share video cameras and video screens among those small groups too,” he said.

Sendbird launched in 2013 and has raised over $220 million including a $100 million round in April, 2021 when the startup was valued at over $1 billion.

At the time of the funding, the company had more than 150 million users. Today, Kim says that has increased to around 270 million users with over 1,000 companies using Sendbird tools.

Sendbird raises $100M at a $1B+ valuation, says 150M+ users now interact using its chat and video APIs

Sendbird adds livestreaming from any app to communications platform by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

September 14, 2022

Chameleon raises cash to help SaaS companies build better onboarding experiences

Chameleon, a startup providing low- and no-code tools designed to help software companies personalize the appearance of their apps, today announced that it raised $13 million. Part of a Series A funding round led by Matrix Partners with participation from True Ventures, the proceeds — which bring Chameleon’s total raised to $14.8 million — will be put toward expanding the platform and growing headcount from 30 employees to around 45 by the end of the year, according to CEO Pulkit Agrawal.

One recent, noteworthy shift in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry has been toward “consumerized” business models, Agrawal told me in an interview. Month-to-month payments from end-users are replacing annual corporate contracts sold to executives — one recent survey found that more than 50% of SaaS companies now leverage usage-based pricing. Tangibly, this means that the decision-making power is increasingly in the hands of the individual user, posing a problem for software vendors that lack a way to engage these users.

“It is imperative [vendors] are able to capture the attention of users and help them find ‘aha’ moments, so they can discover value and continue to deepen their engagement,” Agrawal said via email. “However dedicating a product and engineering team to this initiative puts at risk core feature building, which leads to the gap of communicating functional value without a means to — and where Chameleon fills the void.”

Agrawal founded Chameleon in 2015 with Brian Norton, a former Salesforce engineer, who he met in San Francisco working at a mobile app startup (Shoto). When the pair saw the long-term impact of user onboarding, they convinced a Y Combinator-backed company to let them build their user onboarding experience. Soon after that, Agrawal and Norton started commercializing the solution, found a paying customer and Chameleon was born.

Image Credits: Chameleon.io

Chameleon’s platform lets software development teams create and test in-product experiences including banners, tooltips, modals, walkthroughs and checklists. Devs can use Chameleon — which integrates with analytics tools from HubSpot and Salesforce — to trigger other services in-app, from Typeform surveys to Zendesk chat sessions.

“Chameleon is important for people who build software and care about getting usage,” Agrawal argued. “Normally, this is digital product teams in large companies. Sometimes they’re also building apps for internal or alternative users where they need to communicate the different features and value propositions in-product, and Chameleon can be leveraged there also.”

Chameleon recently launched HelpBar, a new offering that delivers a “spotlight search” experience within apps so users can search across a company’s help articles, developer docs and blog posts. Also new as of this year is Microsurveys, single-question in-product surveys whose data can be piped into existing analytics tools.

Chameleon’s services somewhat overlap with those of rivals in the low- and no-code development space. For example, CommandBar, which landed $19 million in funding in April, is developing a search bar that devs can use to power natural language searches within their apps. Meanwhile, WorkOS, which raised $80 million in June, lets developers quickly add enterprise features like single sign-on (SSO) and directory sync to their software.

Agrawal also sees Pendo and Appcues as prime competitors. But he asserted that San Francisco-based Chameleon’s business has remained strong as of late, despite headwinds; Chameleon currently has roughly 300 customers.

“Slowdowns and cost efficiency measures make companies want to leverage scalable revenue models, including self-service and product-led growth, which leads to an increase in demand for Chameleon,” Agrawal said. “Chameleon is the deepest product adoption platform that enables modern SaaS companies to personalize and customize their user experience, and thereby improve feature discovery and user engagement.

Chameleon raises cash to help SaaS companies build better onboarding experiences by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch