Docker launches remote container builds, new debugging tools and more

Docker today announced a slew of new products at DockerCon, the company’s user conference which has returned as an in-person event. These include a new remote build service, new debugging tools and the general availability of Docker Scout, the company’s software supply chain security service. The event comes at an interesting point in Docker’s history. […]

Docker launches a first preview of its WebAssembly tooling

Docker is still around and likely doing better — at last in financial terms — than during its early hype cycle that kicked off the container revolution (only to then be eclipsed by Kubernetes and its ecosystem). Today, the company announced the first technical preview of its WebAssembly (Wasm) support.

Browser vendors pioneered Wasm to run web apps at native speeds, with code compiled from C, C++, Rust and other languages and run in a secure sandbox. Currently, you can compile about 40 languages to Wasm. But similar to how node.js brought JavaScript to the server, Wasm is now also migrating to the back end. Cloudflare supports it in its edge computing service, for example.

We’re also starting to see some funding rounds in this space as VCs start waking up to the potential, with Cosmonic today announcing a $9 million funding round for its Wasm PaaS, for example. Fermyon announced a $20 million Series A round earlier this month. Docker clearly wants to be an early player in this space, too.

The company notes that this is still very much a technical preview and that things will likely break. In this case, the Docker Engine uses the same containerd container runtime as the rest of the Docker ecosystem, but instead of using runc to run the container processes, it uses the WasmEdge runtime. While Docker doesn’t go into details here, the promise of WasmRdge is that it offers significantly faster startup times compared to Linux containers and that WasmEdge apps are significantly smaller (and run faster).

Image Credits: Docker

“We see Wasm as a complementary technology to Linux containers where developers can choose which technology they use (or both!) depending on the use case,” Docker’s Michael Irwin writes in today’s announcement. “And as the community explores what’s possible with Wasm, we want to help make Wasm applications easier to develop, build and run using the experience and tools you know and love.”

In addition to the product news, Docker also today announced that it will be joining the Bytecode Alliance, the nonprofit behind WebAssembly and the WebAssembly System Interface that makes these new projects possible, as a voting member.

Docker launches a first preview of its WebAssembly tooling by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

Nothing negative about Positive Food’s meal expansion plan after $7M investment

Positive Food Co., providing freshly packaged salads, heat-and-eat prepared meals and vegan overnight oats, raised $7 million in funding as it goes after the $34 billion fresh prepared foods market.

In 2018, co-founders Schuyler Deerman and James Chan started selling healthy meals at WeWork offices around Los Angeles out of giant Yeti coolers, standing around the kitchens during lunch time.

“At the time, we were in 15 locations, many where you couldn’t walk to get lunch, so you had to either order food in or drive off campus,” Deerman told TechCrunch. “On days when we did the ‘Positive Popups,’ people loved it. We gained sort of a cult following because we had healthy meals at an accessible price point.”

The pair eventually did more than 100 popups before setting up wholesale accounts with local coffee shops where it was selling meals, which include the Vegan Kale Hemp Caesar; the Roasted Beet, Chicken and Goat Cheese Salad; and the Vegan Peanut Butter Overnight Oats. Then the COVID pandemic hit.

At the time, Positive Food had its meals in 70 coffee shops around Los Angeles. Deerman had watched other meal delivery companies, like Munchery and Sprig, close years earlier and had gotten creative with the company’s business model as a result. Now he was watching Positive Food’s own orders dwindle to zero in a matter of two days.

“It was devastating, and it was like we were standing there helpless,” he added.

He and Chan had to make some tough decisions, including streamlining a lot of the business and costs, and unfortunately letting staff go.

However, there was a silver lining for Positive Food. In January 2020, the company was in discussions with Whole Foods about launching a pilot of its meals in a few stores. It also was in the midst of moving to a new, larger facility to manage that new business.

In March, Positive Food was just a few weeks shy of launching that pilot before the whole world went into lockdown. The pilot didn’t happen, and even though the company had to wait another nine months, it eventually entered Whole Foods.

“What kind of saved us was talking with Whole Foods,” Deerman said. “Our business went to zero, and then we were moving into a giant new facility. I remember thinking this was either the smartest decision ever or one that will end us. It turned out to be the right one.”

In fact, not having much business enabled Deerman and Chan to go heads-down and revamp their business, including updating the menu and packaging and going through U.S. Department of Agriculture approvals. These are some things Deerman believes would not have been quickly possible if their original operations were still in full effect.

During all of that revamping, they made the decision not to go back into the coffee shop business and instead focus on Whole Foods. It has since expanded its locations with them and are now in Bristol Farms locations, including 86 throughout California.

Today, the company announced $7 million in new funding from investors including BlueYard Capital, Western Tech, Y Combinator, Gaingels and a group of entrepreneurs, including Thrive Market CEO Nick Green, Instacart co-founder Max Mullen, Fitbit CEO James Park, Docker co-founder Solomon Hykes, Faire CTO Marcelo Cortes, Season CEO Josh Hix, Exactuals CEO Mike Hurst, Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, Timehop co-founder Jonathan Wegener and Behance founder Scott Belsky.

Much of the demand, as of late, for freshly prepared foods is from consumers shifting to healthier lifestyles, which has even prompted grocery stores to provide more ready-to-eat meals to cater to consumers popping in quickly to pick up food.

Positive Food’s vertical integration technology is mainly done in-house, including production and a cold-chain logistics network. This enables the company to deliver products directly from its kitchens to stores, which Deerman said is different from other consumer packaged goods companies that have to rely on third parties for production and distribution.

The company also has a proprietary “Monte Carlo Simulation” to plug in point-of-sale data to manage its inventory levels at stores and reduce food waste.

The new funding will be used to expand logistics and new channels beyond Whole Foods that Deerman was not able to divulge right now. He said the company has been growing in double-digits month over month, had zero churn and produced five times as much food this year versus the same time period in 2021.

“We will be expanding into more channels as well as launching in new stores, gaining more engagement, developing more products and going after new opportunities,” Deerman said.

As Docker gains momentum, it hauls in $105M Series C on $2B valuation

It wasn’t that long ago that Docker looked like it was on the ropes. In 2019, it sold its enterprise business and decided to focus strictly on a developer audience with a set of commercial and open source tools. It was a pretty big bet for a six-year-old company to sell off the part of itself that was most lucrative at the time and completely shift its focus.

A couple of months ago, the company announced that annual recurring revenue (ARR) had jumped 4x to over $50 million just two years after it decided to restructure. Today, the company announced a $105 million Series C investment on a $2.1 billion valuation.

CEO Scott Johnston, who has been with the company for years in various capacities, made a very clear bet on the developer community, and it is paying off handsomely for him as he has been able to shape a successful business model since the restructuring.

“Two and a half years ago, while we had this product that developers loved; while we had popular upstream open source assets and we had a known brand, it wasn’t clear whether we could take all of that and redo the product strategy we needed to go to market, redo the company business model successfully — all of that was an open question,” Johnston said.

“We’re happy that here we are two and a half years later. We didn’t make perfect decisions or perfect bets all the time, but most of our bets have paid off and are serving developers with the products we’re shipping,” he said.

What’s more, in a time when investment appears to be slowing down, Johnston reports that investors came to him, he had a wealth of opportunity and could have gotten more if he wanted it. “It was unsolicited, and we had choice. We had multiple term sheets that were all competitive. And we could have raised more than 105 that we raised. And so we’re very fortunate to be able to choose.”

He believes that in addition to being a known quantity with an open source component that is popular with developers, the potential market for developer tools is massive, especially as the demand for applications continues to grow. He said the combination of those two factors drove the investor interest in this round.

The company shrank to 70 people when it restructured in 2019. Today it is up to over 150 employees with expectations that number will double in the next year. As the company adds headcount, Johnston said that they have hard metrics related to building a diverse workforce.

“So we have an internal KPI, key performance indicator, that’s quantified in terms of diversity. And we have it at the company level, but then each of the managers, the executives for their functions, are on that as well. And again, to put teeth on it, that’s a number that we had to share with the board as well,” he said.

He said that they look at this on a weekly basis. “We have a weekly roll-up of our progress in our hiring and recruiting funnel and there’s an explicit diversity metric in that weekly recruiting. And so, you know, it goes back to the why, right? And that’s because diverse teams are better teams. It’s better not only from a human standpoint, but it’s better frankly from a capitalist performance standpoint. So we deeply believe that and to execute that belief, we hold ourselves accountable numerically,” he said.

Today’s investment was led by new investor Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Atlassian Ventures, Citi Ventures, Vertex Ventures and Four Rivers, along with existing investors Benchmark Capital, Insight Partners and Tribe Capital. The company has raised $163 million in its current guise on that $2.1 billion valuation. Bain’s Enrique Salem will be joining the Docker board under the terms of the agreement.

Docker founder launches Dagger, a new DevOps platform

It’s been almost exactly four years since Docker founder Solomon Hykes left the company that kickstarted the container revolution. Docker has gone through its share of ups and downs since then, including selling its enterprise business to Mirantis in 2019, but Hykes, who was long the public face of Docker, mostly stayed on the periphery, with the exception of his participation in a few funding rounds. For a while now, though, he’s been quietly working on his next startup, Dagger, which is launching into public beta today and announcing a $20 million Series A funding round.

The round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Nat Friedman (former CEO, GitHub), Brian Stevens (former CTO, Google Cloud and former CTO, Red Hat), Idit Levine (founder and CEO, solo.io), Julius Volz (creator of Prometheus), Ellen Pao (former CEO, Reddit) and Daniel Lopez (co-founder, Bitnami). Previously, Dagger raised a $3 million pre-seed and $7 million seed round led by New Wave.

Dagger, which was co-founded by Hykes and his fellow Docker alums Sam Alba and Andrea Luzzardi, aims to build what the team calls a “devops operating system.” Hykes noted how starting this new venture began with the team and not necessarily a product idea. The co-founders went looking for problems they could solve for the developer community and it quickly became clear to them that the DevOps process remains a bottleneck.

“We decided to start from zero and not assume we know anything,” Hykes told me about the process the team used to develop its ideas. “We began this long discovery process to just be a blank slate and listen to people’s problems. And they pulled us very quickly in the direction of CI/CD and automation pipelines. You know, you’ve got dev — and developers are happy and productive. You’ve got ops — things scale, there’s all this cool cloud stuff — and the glue in the middle, the DevOps part, that’s just really complicated. People find a way, but they just don’t like the experience and they all waste time and resources doing it. So we focused on that.”

The team argues that there are a lot of very powerful DevOps tools, but they tend to be very specialized — and as these applications expand in scope, so does the DevOps stack. “There’s no shortage of specialized tools, but then [developers] have to glue them all together — and the glue is the bottleneck. So we’re focusing on replacing the glue with something better,” said Hykes.

Specifically, that means Dagger lets DevOps engineers write their pipelines as declarative models in CUE (which stands for “configure, unify, execute”). With this, engineers can describe their pipelines and connect the different pieces to each other, all in code. Dagger calls these individual pieces “actions” and they, too, are described declaratively.

“The main difference is that it’s basically a real software development experience,” Hykes explained. “So if there’s an action that you like that someone else wrote, you can import it. If you want to look at the source code of that action, you can look at it, it’s in the same language you already know. And that action probably is built by combining smaller and more specialized actions all the way down. So it’s more like regular software.”

To complement the developer experience, the Dagger team is also building what it calls “Dagger Universe,” a curated library of packages that developers can import into their Dagger configurations.

This overall approach also means that potential users can keep their existing CI infrastructure in place. Dagger isn’t meant to be a replacement for the likes of Circle CI or GitLab — it’s basically a layer on top of that.

“It is far too complicated for DevOps teams to manage their infrastructure and deploy software to different clouds, but Dagger has elegantly cracked the code to streamline software supply chain management,” said Erica Brescia of Redpoint Ventures. “By making custom app delivery pipelines portable, the Dagger team has changed the game for building and deploying software.”

Hykes noted that he is taking quite a few learnings from his experience at Docker into building Dagger. Like Docker, Dagger will have an open-source piece to it and while the team is still figuring out the details, it’s going to be a key part of the Dagger ecosystem.

“Dagger is going to be a hybrid platform,” Hykes explained. “So there’s an open source engine, which we’re launching [today], and there will be an optional cloud service that will be very tightly integrated, but still optional. […] Our conclusion from Docker is, if you want a large and thriving developer community, you need a real open source project. It can’t be fake open source. But if you want that community to continue thriving — and if user experience specifically is important — then you need to connect that community to one product vision and not 10,000 different product visions.”

For now, the team is going to focus on this open source engine to see what the community needs and where the pain points are. The managed service will come later. Hykes noted that at Docker, everything happend so quickly and the service became such a foundational technology almost overnight, the company was pulled into too many different directions. With Dagger, he plans to take things slower — and because Dagger doesn’t run the applications itself, he believes that the team will be able to maintain this focus.

“We’re going to do the same thing with commercialization. I think with commercialization, at Docker, we felt like there was a playbook that we were obligated to follow and we didn’t really listen to our community enough,” Hykes said.

Dagger is going to use the new funding to expand its engineering team to build out its product, but the company is also hiring to build out a marketing and developer relations team.

Kubernetes development platform Okteto raises $15M Series A

Okteto, a startup that makes it easier for developers to quickly spin up Kubernetes-based development environments in order to speed up their development process, today announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A funding round.

The round was led by Two Sigma Ventures, with existing investors Haystack, Root Ventures, and Uncorrelated Ventures also participating, as well as a number of individual investors, including LaunchDarkly founder and CTO John Kodumal, Replicated founders Grant Miller and Marc Campbell, FingerprintJS founder and CEO Dan Pinto, Bitnami founder Erica Brescia, and Mesosphere founder Florian Leibert.

The company, which participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 class, already counts companies like Monday.com, LaunchDarkly and Replicated among its customers.

Image Credits: Okteto

As Okteto co-founder and CEO Ramiro Berrelleza told me, the idea for the service came from his experience at companies like Microsoft and Atlassian. There, he noticed that Kubernetes and microservices made life easier for operations teams, but not necessarily for developers.

“You have all of these really cool tools for production, deployment, containers, Kubernetes, microservices — but what I saw from my side as a developer was, ‘hey, all this is great, I see why it’s super useful for production — it all makes a lot of sense — but it makes my life as a developer harder,” he said, comparing today’s development practices with tools like Ruby on Rails or the kinds of server applications he built at Atlassian. When Berrelleza met with his co-founders Pablo Chico de Guzman (CTO), who was previously at Docker, and Ramon Lamana (CPO), who previously worked at Atlassian, they realized that they all faced the exact same problems. As is so often that case, that’s what gave the team the impetus to try to solve this issue once and for all.

Image Credits: Okteto

The core idea behind Okteto is that the development environment should look exactly like the production environment. “The first key was that we need to give developers access to something that is as close to production as possible — without the complexities of having to wait for things to be deployed and having to go through all this build process,” he said.

With Okteto, developers get remote dev environments running on Kubernetes clusters with all of the microservices, databases and other services that would run in their production environment — and once they are done with their work, they can shut down the environment just as easily.

Berrelleza noted that part of the company’s philosophy is to ensure that its service integrates with a developer’s existing workflow. So if there is already a Docker Compose file that codifies the production environment, Okteto can take that to set up the dev environment, too, for example (or developers can write their own okteto.yml manifests, too).

The team is looking to expand its feature set to go beyond setting up dev environments to also include tools for writing tests, but also to extend its ephemeral environments to more use cases. Last year, it shipped what the company calls ‘preview environments,’ for example, which its customers can use to show off the current state of a project to their own customers, designers or other stakeholders who wouldn’t typically be part of the software development process. “The software development process is not just writing code. The more you can bring in these people early on in the cycle, the better it is for everyone,” Berrelleza said.

Okteto isn’t the only company tackling this issue. Just yesterday, Signadot launched its service into public beta and it, too, promises to provide developers with faster feedback loops thanks to its ability to quickly spin up production-like environments for testing. Both companies take slightly different approaches to this from a technical perspective, but their goals are very similar.

Mirantis on run rate over $100M two years after buying Docker Enterprise assets

When Docker announced it was selling Docker Enterprise in 2019, it was a big surprise to industry watchers. Perhaps an even bigger surprise was that the buyer was Mirantis, a company best known for commercializing the OpenStack project.

After the sale, Docker pivoted to a developer-focussed company and reported last week it had $50 million in ARR last year. In a conversation with TechCrunch this week, Mirantis CEO Andrian Ionel said the company made $28 million in ARR last quarter, putting it on a run rate of well over $100 million.

Ionel says that the revenue split is about 50/50 when it comes to the assets it bought from Docker and rebranded as Mirantis — including Docker Enterprise Engine, Docker Trusted Registry, Docker Unified Control Plane and Docker CLI — and the cloud platform tools all built on Kuberentes that the company had prior to that purchase. It’s worth noting that it also purchased Lens in 2020, an IDE (integrated development environment) designed specifically for Kubernetes, and that also helped.

But essentially both Docker and Mirantis came in at $50 million ARR in terms of what Docker was able to create on its own after selling the enterprise product, and what Mirantis turned those Docker enterprise assets into. It’s a rare deal that matches up so well for both parties two years after it happened, but Ionel says he certainly couldn’t have known that at the time.

“It’s been a fantastic journey, an unbelievable journey. It started with signing the deal in November 2019. But it was far from clear to everybody at the time how this was going to work out,” he said. For starters, it created some confusion for customers about what the acquisition meant for the future of the company, but he says that it didn’t take long for them to see the vision the company had for the combined product sets.

“It turned out that people very, very quickly understood what our shared product vision was, and how we were creating a new company and I think this is the key theme. It’s really not just about Mirantis acquiring Docker Enterprise. It’s much more about us building a company that leverages the assets of both companies and emerging as a fresh and stronger company,” Ionel explained.

The board also debated the merits of buying these assets. “It was heavily debated in our board prior to the acquisition, as you can imagine, because a lot of acquisitions can go wrong, but it’s been super successful. It’s added tremendous shareholder value. It’s been definitely a fantastic bet for us that really accelerated our journey with Kubernetes and into the future,” he said.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing though after the deal closed. It began with laying off 40% of the company it had acquired, which Ionel acknowledged was a painful way to start. But by consolidating engineering and some other business functions under one umbrella, the company was able to save money that would lead to its eventual success.

Ionel reports that Mirantis has been cashflow positive for the past two years, generating over $19 million in cash in that time. It expanded relationships with 300 customers in place at the time of the merger including Apple, Visa and Booking.com, while adding 100 new ones along the way.

Overall, Ionel couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome than he got from the Docker Enterprise deal.”It’s been a fantastic journey, challenging at times because we did have to restructure the Docker Enterprise business, but we did it quickly and decisively and I think successfully and the net result is that we have a thriving business on our hands now.”

Docker makes comeback with over $50M in ARR two years into restructuring

It’s surely been a turbulent couple of years for Docker, the open source containerization company that launched in 2013, but it seems to have found its financial footing again. Today, it announced that over the last fiscal year, annual recurring revenue (ARR) has jumped 4x to over $50 million.

That’s quite a comeback for a company that faced great turmoil starting in 2019, when then-CEO Steve Singh stepped down and was replaced briefly by Rob Bearden. Shortly thereafter, it sold its enterprise business, its primary source of revenue, before eventually promoting longtime exec Scott Johnston to CEO.

At that time, it also took on new funding going back almost to square one, actually taking on the investment as a Series A company. It simultaneously implemented a new developer-centered strategy while dropping from 400 employees down to just 60. A few months later, the first wave of the pandemic hit. It was not an easy time, according to Johnston, who had to steer the company through this instability.

“November 2019 was a time [fraught] with risk and uncertainty but we believed in the tailwinds of the market, we believed in the developers’ love of our product, and that we could come together as a team, focus on the developer, deliver great products and build a legitimate business,” Johnston told me.

Docker had a couple of things going for it, even with that uncertainty. It had widespread brand recognition among developers and was synonymous with containerization, a way to package and deliver software as individual services in the cloud, rather than one monolithic application.

It also has a bunch of open source pieces that can act as the top of the funnel for eventual sales activity, with the goal of turning some of the users of the free products into paying customers. That appears to have happened with increasing frequency over the last year, judging from the company’s ARR growth over that period.

The goal in the early days of the restructuring was to capture that developer momentum around the brand and deliver them the free open source products, then expand into the paid products over time for a certain percentage of them. This was a very different approach from what they took when they were selling Docker Enterprise and were generally selling to IT, rather than developers or their managers.

That product-led growth approach worked from a commercial perspective when the managers began buying related commercial tools. “So when the developer has a great experience using the free product, and as they and their organizations scale their use of the products, then there’s features that managers value that they are willing to pay for.”

He added, “What you’re seeing with the financial performance that we described in our blog post that’s driven purely from those large organizations that realize these productivity benefits … and are willing to pay for the management security tools to enable organization-wide adoption.”

Docker was founded in 2013 before restructuring in 2019. At the time it sold its enterprise business to Mirantis, the company took on a $35 million Series A investment from Benchmark Capital and Insight Partners. They also nabbed a $23 million Series B last March.

At the time of the restructuring, I wrote: “Whether this approach can work is still unclear, but Johnston sees this as the way forward. Time will tell if the strategy is successful or not.”

With over $50 million in ARR, the jury may still be out, but it’s certainly headed in the right direction with results I reckon most investors would be happy with. Now they have to continue building on this momentum.

Software supply chain platform Cloudsmith raises $15M Series A led by Tiger Global

Cloudsmith, a cloud platform for software supply chain management, has raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by Tiger Global, which it claims is the largest ever Series A funding round in Northern Ireland since 2005 (according to PitchBook data). The company plans to use the new funding to hire 60 new employees and expand its US sales and engineering teams.

Other investors in the round include Shasta, Amaranthine, Sorenson, and Leadout Capital as well as previous investors Frontline, MMC, and Techstart. Docker CEO Scott Johnston, Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar, and Puppet CEO Yvonne Wassenaar also participated in the round.

The Belfast-headquartered startup allows businesses to manage all the incoming software it uses via the cloud, meaning you don’t have to have dedicated support staff in the office which requires dedicated staffing, VPNs, and licenses.

Cloudsmith says its software scans for security vulnerabilities and has customers in Europe, the US, the Middle East, and Australia, including the Internet Systems Consortium, Carta, and Font Awesome.

Cloudsmith was founded in 2016 by former NYSE developers Alan Carson and Lee Skillen and announced a £2.1 million seed investment round led by Frontline Ventures, MMC Ventures, and Techstart in 2019.

Alan Carson, Co-Founder & CEO of Cloudsmith, said: “Cloudsmith was built to tackle the complexity of managing software assets, which is a key challenge for any company to secure their software supply chains. Our service allows our customers to track and control the distribution of any software asset and provides tooling to minimize the risks of utilizing open-source software. It’s a massive problem for the whole industry and our investors, led by Tiger Global, understand the need for a fully managed cloud-native solution that Cloudsmith provides.”

Vidya Raman, Principal at Sorenson Ventures, said: “While package management is by no means a new or flashy software space, it is a critical component of the software development lifecycle. The need for both cloud-native software development and secure software supply chains has resulted in the need to reinvent package management. That’s where Cloudsmith’s Continuous Packaging platform has come in and continues to lead that market. It is in the new world that Cloudsmith truly shines.”

Speaking to TechCrunch over a call, Carson added: “If you think about the last 10 years, it’s been about, building automated pipelines. For companies to do deployments or distribute their software to other companies, they need tools, but they also need to move the assets around and store the assets that are both being pulled into that process and generated by that process and that’s what CloudSmith ultimately does.”

He added: “Other companies tend to have legacy solutions. Our product is fully managed and makes it a lot easier for companies. They don’t have to put any resource behind keeping it up, we’ll handle it for them. So the total cost of ownership is lower. And they can spend more time actually crafting the software rather than worrying about how to store and distribute it within their internal systems.”

Slapdash raises $3.7M seed to ship a workplace apps command bar

The explosion in productivity software amid a broader remote work boom has been one of the pandemic’s clearest tech impacts. But learning to use a dozen new programs while having to decipher which data is hosted where can sometimes seem to have an adverse effect on worker productivity. It’s all time that users can take for granted, even when carrying out common tasks like navigating to the calendar to view more info to click a link to open the browser to redirect to the native app to open a Zoom call.

Slapdash is aiming to carve a new niche out for itself among workplace software tools, pushing a desire for peak performance to the forefront with a product that shaves seconds off each instance where a user needs to find data hosted in a cloud app or carry out an action. While most of the integration-heavy software suites to emerge during the remote work boom have focused on promoting visibility or re-skinning workflows across the tangled weave of SaaS apps, Slapdash founder Ivan Kanevski hopes that the company’s efforts to engineer a quicker path to information will push tech workers to integrate another tool into their workflow.

The team tells TechCrunch that they’ve has raised $3.7 million in seed funding from investors that include S28 Capital, Quiet Capital, Quarry Ventures and Twenty Two Ventures. Angels participating in the round include co-founders at companies like Patreon, Docker and Zynga.

Image Credits: Slapdash

Kanevski says the team sought to emulate the success of popular apps like Superhuman which have pushed low-latency command line interface navigation while emulating some of the sleek internal tools used at companies like Facebook where he spent nearly six years as a software engineer.

Slapdash’s command line widget can be pulled up anywhere, once installed, with a quick keyboard shortcut. From there, users can search through a laundry list of indexable apps including Slack, Zoom, Jira and about twenty others. Beyond command line access, users can create folders of files and actions inside the full desktop app or create their own keyboard shortcuts to quickly hammer out a task. The app is available on Mac, Windows, Linux and the web.

“We’re not trying to displace the applications that you connect to Slapdash,” he says. “You won’t see us, for example, building document editing, you won’t see us building project management, just because our sort of philosophy is that we’re a neutral platform.”

The company offers a free tier for users indexing up to five apps and creating ten commands and spaces, any more than that and you level up into a $12 per month paid plan. Things look more customized for enterprise-wide pricing. As the team hopes to make the tool essential to startups, Kanevski see the app’s hefty utility for individual users as a clear asset in scaling up.

“If you anticipate rolling this out to larger organizations, you would want the people that are using the software to have a blast with it,” he says. “We have quite a lot of confidence that even at this sort of individual atomic level, we built something pretty joyful and helpful.”