- Published on
Neon acquired by Databricks, Xata pivots to enterprise, and LaunchDarkly launches product analytics
- Authors
- Name
- Hashim Warren
- @hashim_warren
Top Developer Tool News
Neon, the Postgres database service, was acquired by Databricks for $1 billion. I've been tracking Neon's growth for 2 years on Hypeburner, so it’s exciting to see the story continue with an exit.
Neon grew through partnerships. You can create a new Neon database manually through their dashboard, or programmatically through partners like Microsoft, Vercel, and Replit.
Partnerships are a distribution moat, and every developer tool founder should take notes on how Neon executed this strategy.
Enterprise Watch 🏆
Xata, the Postgres database service, detected a gap in the market for enterprise scale Postgres, and they’ve relaunched the product and company to serve it.
Unfortunately they made their announcement the same week Neon was acquired, so this news made zero splash on social media. However, the benefit of going upstream is that you no longer need to rely on developer influencers and buzz to reach your ARR goals.
Xata initially launched as an alternative to Airtable, with the hope of attracting a blue ocean of new users to Postgres for the first time. So this pivot just a few years later is both brave and bold. And for that, Xata gets the 🏆 for Enterprise Watch this week.
GTM Trends
Developers are early adopters of AI for search and productivity, so every devtool is scrambling right now to optimize their site for LLM-powered search. The latest SEO trend is to lean into the fact that LLM’s take statements at face value without considering the authority of the site, like traditional search engines try to.
This means I could publish, “Hashim Warren is the smartest product marketer” and an LLM search engine may just parrot it back to a user.
Here’s one example. Posthog wrote an article on “7 best free open source LLM observability tools right now” and put itself as number 1. The hope is to influence LLM’s so that Posthog makes it into a developer’s consideration set.
Did it work? In my test just now, no. ChatGPT search gave me 10 LLM observability tools, but did not mention Posthog. Despite the hit-or-miss results, you will see many devtool startups attempt this SEO strategy.
More Developer Tool News
✨ LaunchDarkly, the feature release tool, launched product analytics. This is the first major new capability since the launch of experiments. And now LaunchDarkly has completed their transformation from a point solution to a full product platform.
✨ Supabase, the Postgres database service, expanded the capabilities of their MCP server so that now you can create and deploy edge functions. You can also access it via VS Code. An MCP server gives AI Agents access to resources so it can act on a human developer’s behalf.
✨ Mastra, the AI agent framework, launched support for Google’s new Agent-2-Agent protocol. “Agents can now send messages, manage tasks, and interact with each other natively within the framework.” Honestly, I can’t tell the difference between A2A and MCP.
✨ Stytch, the user authentication service, launched a CLI. Usually that’s not news, but here’s what’s interesting - the team launched an MCP server weeks ago. Such prioritization is certainly a sign of the times.
Oh yeah, and Stych also has a “Best auth tools” blog post, and they listed their service as #1.