Developers use a number of tools to collaborate on, facilitate, and track their projects from bug tracking and API management to code sharing networks and mobile back-end services. Now, investors are starting to pour attention – and dollars – into a relatively young market we categorize as developer tools or any program or application that helps developers devise, debug, test, or in any other way support code. Over the past year, $646M has been invested into developer tools across 94 deals.
The majority of funding growth into developer tools start-ups is coming at the seed and Series A stages, which may explain why average funding per quarter over the past two years trended just below $20M. Of course, it’s worth mentioning that Github’s massive $100M financing last June was also categorized as a Series A round. As seen below, 43 out of the 72 deals in the developer tools market in the last year were <$5M. Some of the later stage deals into the developer tools space over the past year included API technology provider Apigee and app performance management service New Relic.
Distinguishing by geography, deal activity for developer tools companies largely centers around Silicon Valley with more than 50% of overall deals in the past two years. About 20% of deals to the developer tool space go to New York and Massachusetts.
International markets saw the most deal growth as deals to the developer tools market jumped 350% vs. the prior year. Just two weeks ago, Finland-based mobile development and testing service Bitbar, for example, closed a $3M Series A round from investors including Qualcomm Ventures and DFJ Esprit.
