This Week in Devtools - Developer Tools Roundup

🚀 Launch of the Week: Pinecone Assistant

Pinecone, the vector database company, announced that their AI product called Assistant is now out of beta. The Pinecone Assistant "is an API service built to power grounded chat and agent-based applications."

At first blush Assistant looks like it's a step outside what you'd expect from a database SaaS. But this is a shrewd product move. Developers choose Pinecone as the vector database in their RAG systems. These systems require devs to act as orchestra conductors with vector databases, data chunking tools, embedding services, LLMs, and file storage all playing a harmonized tune.

It's kind of a mess.

There are several startups competing to be the way you un-mess your RAG. And they all promise to reduce lock-in to any one vector database. OpenAI even offers their own lightweight RAG solution. Of course, it's also called Assistants.

Instead of waiting around and being the commodity spoke in everyone else's wheel, Pinecone made their own Assistant to make it easy to get started with RAG. Plus they claim it "delivers up to 12% more accurate results than OpenAI Assistants".

💰 Fundraising Watch: Render

Clap it up for the Render team!

Render, the app platform announced: "we've surpassed 2 million developers on the platform and added $80M in Series C financing, bringing our total funding to$ 157M."

Render has been on a growth tear since Heroku closed their free tier 2.5 years ago.

Flashback to 2023. Render announced their series B and self-reported "well over half a million" devs on the platform. That's 4x growth. Remarkable.

🏆 Enterprise Watch: Neon

Neon, the Postgres database launched notifications for Slack. Now within Slack, "you'll receive automatic notifications when you reach your plan limits for compute hours, storage, or data transfer."

A feature like this usually gets buried on a PM's roadmap. But large customers love product notifications in Slack, because unlike email it enables them to collaborate across multiple teams easier.

So, I salute Neon for taking a short break from AI features, and giving paying customers what they want. For that they get this week's Enterprise Watch trophy 🏆.

🤝 Partnership Watch: Mux + Vercel

Mux, the video platform added an app to the Vercel marketplace. Mux explains, "with this integration, you can get high-performance video playback, delivery, and analytics into your codebase in just a few minutes."

Mux elevated this announcement to more than just a press release by conducting an interview with Vercel's VP of Product, Lee Robinson.

I was blown away as I watched the video because the transcript on the blog post highlights the spoken words as the video plays. Mux merchandised the capabilities of their video player to me in the context of learning about their partnership. Great work! 🙌🏽

🆕 More News

Sanity's Startup Program

✨ Sanity, the headless CMS launched a new program for startups. "This program provides early-stage startups with free access to Sanity's powerful content management tools".

What are the restrictions?

"To be eligible, your startup must have fewer than 20 employees, raised less than $5M in total funding… The program is currently available to portfolio companies of select venture partners including Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, Heavybit."

I like this. Sanity's free tier already allows for 20 user seats, but probably attracts a lot of hobbyists. This new, exclusive free tier enables companies to self-select as potential future enterprise customers. Smart.

Agent Experience (AX)

✨ Mathias Biilmann, the co-founder of Netlify, wrote a banger article about a new concept - Agent Experience (AX). Biilmann writes: "We need to start focusing on AX or 'agent experience' — the holistic experience AI agents will have as the user of a product or platform."

Biilmann explained the need for AX thinking:

"Is it simple for an Agent to get access to operating a platform on behalf of a user? Are there clean, well described APIs that agents can operate? Are there machine-ready documentation and context for LLMs and agents to properly use the available platform and SDKs? Addressing the distinct needs of agents through better AX, will improve their usefulness for the benefit of the human user."

Matt coined "jamstack" in the past, so he knows how to spot trends and give it a hook we can all rally around. Keep an ear open for more devtool companies touting the AX of their product.

Knock's TeamsKit

✨ Shout out to my home team! At Knock we announced TeamsKit, "a complete toolkit for integrating Microsoft Teams as a notification channel into your product." This is a fantastic release that the whole team is proud of.

If you want to engage enterprise customers in Teams, this toolkit is for you.

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