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Plaid launches for business, Descope's B2B onboarding play, and Ory acquires BoxyHQ
- Authors
- Name
- Hashim Warren
- @hashim_warren
Launch of the Week
Plaid, the fintech infrastructure platform, released "transactions for business", an expansion of their service that used to be focused on consumers. Plaid explains that this new capability can help developers build experiences that "automate accounting, streamline tax prep, forecast cash flow, or power faster lending decisions."
Enterprise Watch 🏆
Descope, the identity and access management platform, published use case content that competes for the search term B2B onboarding. In my test the page is already 4th in Google, behind NorthPass, Everafter, and Arrows. Out of those competitors Descope is the only auth provider and the only developer focused solution.
The big learning from this Descope page is to be explicit about the use cases your product fills. The page spells out three use cases, and that makes the product's value clear and compelling for humans and for AI Agents who are evaluating Descope.
Fundraising and Acquisitions
Ory, the auth platform, acquired BoxyHQ and relaunched it as Ory Polis. The new offering "brings enterprise-ready single sign-on (SSO), directory synchronization, and self-service onboarding" to businesses. I wasn't familiar with Ory before this news, but I am impressed that the product powers auth experiences for OpenAI, Lumin, and Fandom.
More Developer Tool News
✨ Sentry, the application monitoring tool, released the Session Health dashboard, "a quick way to see how your release actually impacted users, with crash-free rates, error spikes, and session counts all mapped to deploys." Visit the announcement to see how Sentry used interactive images to walk readers through the dashboard features.
✨ Shadcn, a Vercel sponsored component library, is the recommended front-end included in the AI model system prompts for ChatGPT and Claude. This means that when a user wants to build a webapp, the model will default to using shadcn unless you specify a different library.
This reveals that the system prompt is a new distribution channel for developer tools. If you run a shadcn competitor, you can't just influence the LLMs to recommend your product through onsite content optimizations. You'd need the team at ChatGPT or Claude to manually include your product in the system prompt.
✨ Postman, the API tool launched a way to create an MCP server using any set of public APIs in their large library. A funny note though - they published a recorded demo of Claude using the MCP server, but it failed at the end. This is understandable if the demo was live, but this walk-thru was recorded and edited.
✨ Cloudinary, the media CDN, launched AssetLink for Shopify, "an embedded app that makes it fast, easy, and affordable to integrate Cloudinary with your Shopify Stores." I love this GTM effort. More startups are prioritizing distribution and strategic partnerships with other platforms.
✨ LaunchDarkly, the feature release platform unveiled AI Configs - a "runtime control for your AI workflows, so you can improve the quality and consistency of your AI-generated output." AI-powered apps are growing up and now need tools like this to go from demo to production.