Upstash raises $10m, Vercel and Perplexity partner, WordPress previews dev features

"Devtools Weekly" by Hypeburner tracks the business of developer tools. I'm your editor, Hashim Warren.

This week I was happy to see a fundraising announcement that didn't include the usual flim-flam about growth, and some made up category name. Instead we have real data on users and revenue.

That's our lead story. Let's get into it...

Hot Product Launch

It's not a product or feature launch, but it's definitely the most exciting news this week. Serverless database Upstash has been on a tear with their user base "growing from 12,000 developers in March 2022 to 85,000 today".

But what about revenue? On top of the user growth Upstash announced that they've hit $1 million in ARR. On top of that they also closed a round of fundraising, with "a$ 10 million Series A led by a16z".

Read the full announcement at Techcrunch.

Enterprise Watch

Release management tool, PostHog achieved HIPAA compliance.

Lack of HIPAA compliance is a barrier for any developer tool that wants to earn business from customers who deal with sensitive health related data.

In the past PostHog was hand wavvy about HIPPA compliance. They claimed to be safe because they had a self-hosted option that customers can use to control their own data. I dug up their old page on HIPPA compliance in the WayBack Machine so you can compare for yourself.

I'm sure that explanation made the Marketers feel clever, but likely frustrated the Sales team. They're the ones who had to close enterprise deals and answer the customer question, "Are you truly HIPPA compliant or not?"

Today for PostHog's Sales team that answer is "Yes!"

Front-End Products

✨ API gateway, Graphbase now has support for federated GraphQL subscriptions. This is a catch-up feature that brings the product up to parity with WunderGraph which launched subscriptions a few weeks ago. And of course Apollo has had federated subscriptions since last year.

Compare to Apollo

Compare to WunderGraph

✨ App platform, Vercel launched AI integrations, which includes search engine Perplexity.✨ Another app platform, Render introduced a feature that helps to restrict the sharing of environment variables to the wrong environment.

✨ Popular CMS, WordPress is previewing new features for developers, including the "Block Bindings API". The new API will empower developers to extend WordPress's core UI components (called blocks) to accept metadata from any part of WordPress.

What can you learn about growing users and revenue from this week's product launches?

I'm going live on Friday at 1PM ET/ 10AM PT to show what I would incorporate from these launches, and workshop how I would improve them.

See you on Friday!

Hashim Warren, Hypeburner