Q2 2022 an important quarter for DevOps

PitchBook’s Emerging Technology Indicator (ETI) report issues a thorough analysis of the most exciting and disruptive technologies pushing growth opportunities, tracking a limited set of startups receiving seed and early-stage investment from top VC firms.

Throughout the report, ETI deals will refer to investment deals from top VC firms into disruptive seed or early-stage companies.

With DevOps coming in as one of the most exciting sectors of the quarter, in terms of deal count and value, growth across the sector is in high-gear with no signs of slowing.

PitchBook tracked DevOps as a significant category of investment, coming in as the second-largest area of ETI investment behind Web3 & DeFi, at $654 million, and amounting to the largest quarter for the sector across the last six quarters.

DevOps is a broad category of technology that can be thought of as developers (dev) and operations teams (ops) working together to develop, build and deliver infrastructure IT and related software helping organisations run and maintain software applications.

DevOps practices work to accelerate the development and delivery of secure software through the use of automation, fast feedback, collaboration and iterative improvement, and a large part of the technology within DevOps is considered mission critical, as it maintains a high level of support to the daily operations of a firm’s digital products and services.

Relatively aggressive ETI investment into DevOps may be a reflection of the defensive features of tech being advantaged by the consistent growth of cloud computing and sustained demand for novel ways to help propel digital transformation forward.

Q2 deals delineated to a wide range of DevOps applications from application building to infrastructure monitoring and documentation tracking.

Most notably, the largest amount raised was a $145 million Series B round, an astonishing deal for this industry, for Supabase, a company looking to commercialise its open-source application development platform which allows developers to automate and outsource an important portion of the back-end infrastructure of mobile app development – a product commonly known as “serverless” development.

Other DevOps startups mainly based their focus on operational infrastructure tools, with the most notable deals being Tailscale, a secure networking solution raising $101 million in a Series B round, Komodor, a cloud infrastructure monitoring company raising $42 million in a Series B round, Deno, startup providing cloud server management raising $21 million in Series A, and RapidFort, startup providing a container optimisation software raising $18 million in a seed round.

As well as operational tools, multiple other startups raised ETI capital in an effort to support developers design and build novel applications.

Most notably, the low-code internal application tool builder Appsmith raised $42 million in a Series B round, Convex Systems, a serverless SDK provider raised $26 million in a Series B round, Glide, a low-code mobile app builder raised $20 million in a Series A1 round, and API integration platform Pipedream raised a $20 million Series A round.

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