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Supabase raises $200 million, Autoblocks testing and evals for AI, Convex partners with Bolt, and LaunchDarkly acquires Houseware
- Authors
- Name
- Hashim Warren
- @hashim_warren
Launch of the Week
Every developer suddenly has an AI testing and evaluation problem. Everyone celebrates when OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google release more capable.models. But for devs who need to productize AI, more powerful AI also means the surface area of what can go wrong increases.
That’s why Autoblocks gets LotW for Agent Simulate, a testing and eval tool for AI Agents. Agent Simulate lets you spin up hundreds of synthetic-human Agents that will have voice conversations with your agentic systems for testing and evaluation.
Landing page
ProductHunt
Demo video
Enterprise Watch 🏆
Mux, the video infra for live streaming and on-demand video is fiddling with their packaging and pricing, again. The new change adds a $499 a month self-service plan for Mux’s analytics and monitoring tool.
Why that price point? $500 is likely the highest amount an employee can put on a corporate card for a monthly service without having to go through a long procurement process. So not Mux may get a cohort of customers who need more than the free tier, but want to get started fast.
More developer tools should model out a self-serve tier for enterprise customers, like Mux has.
Partnerships
Convex, the database-as-a-service released Convex Chef, an AI app builder that understands how to create fullstack apps. Convex partnered with the popular AI app builder, Bolt to create chef, and also uses Webcontainers, a tool from Bolt’s parent company, Stackblitz.
How is this different then let’s say using v0 with their Supabase integration? Convex explains “Chef uses Convex’s AI-optimized APIs to complete more sophisticated full-stack tasks than any other app-building tool.”
Blog post
Twitter
YouTube - Chef vs Bolt / Lovable / v0
Acquisitions
Launchdarkly is on an acquisition spree this year. The release management platform acquired highlight.io, an open source monitoring tool. And just 2 months ago LaunchDarkly acquired Houseware, a product analytics tool.
I’m not sure “release management” really describes all that LaunchDarkly does anymore. Glancing at their homepage I see the struggle to retain a position the company leads, while moving into vertical markets with their new product offerings. It will be interesting to watch how LaunchDarkly’s messaging evolves.
Fundraising
Supabase announced a $200 million fundraising round, and Fortune had the exclusive story. The startup’s valuation stays the same at $2 billion.
Why now? Co-founder Paul Cobblestone explains, “Our sign-up rate just doubled in the past three months because of vibe coding—Bolt, Lovable, Cursor, all those.”
Dev Tool News
Posthog, the product management suite launched error tracking out of beta - the same week that LaunchDarkly acquired highlight.io. The race to capture Sentry’s market share is heating up.
Imagekit, the API-first media management platform revealed that building useful tools sent them more traffic and converted at a higher rate than content marketing and advertising. I love this go-to-market motion for dev tool startups. If you want to learn how to launch tools that attract new users, I recommend Jay Baer’s book “Youtility”.
Vercel, the front-end platform launched a beta of bot detection and blocking. As the “dead internet” grows, and agentic traffic stampedes on websites, I expect this to become Vercel’s most important feature.
Neon, the Postgres database service launched a static backup solution they call Snapshots. These are “point-in-time copies of the database state” that are “designed to preserve the exact data and schema at the moment they were created.”
Metabase, the product analytics tool recently launched their Embedded Analytics SDK for React. Metabase explains that this enables “more control, customization, and flexibility over how your in-app analytics look, feel, and function inside your app.”
The State of AI in Webdev report came out with responses from more than 4,000 developers. One big surprise is that GitHub Copilot and Cursor are neck-and-neck as the most used IDEs for coding with AI.