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Paddle raises $25M, GrowthBook 4.0 ships, and MCP servers are everywhere
- Authors
- Name
- Hashim Warren
- @hashim_warren
Launch of the Week
GrowthBook, the feature flagging platform, launched version 4.0 with a a bunch of new features. The standout addition is their SQL Explorer, a lightweight BI tool that lets you explore data directly within GrowthBook without switching to Looker or similar platforms.
And of course, GrowthBook shipped their own MCP server.
Enterprise Watch 🏆
Cloudinary, the image and video management platform, gets the trophy this week for announcing availability on AWS Marketplace.
It's a little strange though, because the company listed itself as in the "AI Agents and Tools" category.
In any case, the benefit of being on the marketplace isn't discovery, but the ability for customers to purchase and manage Cloudinary services directly through AWS.
Funding and Acquisitions
Paddle, the Merchant of Record platform, raised $25M and made some aggressive expansion moves. The company opened a new Austin office and hired executives from Shopify, ServiceNow, and Intercom.
What's interesting about Paddle's timing is their bet on web monetization for consumer apps. With Apple's recent policy changes in the U.S. and EU allowing app developers to redirect users to web payments, Paddle is fighting to win those new potential customers.
Paddle wrote, "We are seeing a huge increase in the number of consumer app businesses choosing Paddle to manage their web monetization".
GTM Trends
Mux, the video hosting service, announced their "biggest price drop in history" with a 20% reduction across encoding, storage, and delivery. What's smart about this announcement is how they framed it around infrastructure improvements rather than just competitive pressure.
In the past a startup wouldn't have seen a need to explain a price drop. But now that customers are worrried about the business sustainability of their vendors, it's a good idea to make the reasoning for a price drop clear.
More Developer Tool News
✨ Zitadel, the identity management platform, launched a playground for testing authentication flows. When I worked at WP Engine we released a similar experience, and it removed a lot friction that was slowing product adoption.
✨ Stytch, the authentication infrastructure provider, released an MCP server that lets AI agents build enterprise authentication flows directly from tools like Cursor or GitHub Copilot. The demo showed an agent setting up a complete React app with Stytch auth.
✨ Imgix, the image optimization and delivery service, shipped an AI-Powered creative suite that product and marketing team members can use.
The demo images look impressive. But the biggest barrier for Imgix will be changing their positioning from a developer tool to a product that marketers can use. That won't be easy
✨ Algolia, the search and discovery platform, made it into Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Search and Product Discovery.
✨ Matt Biilmann, the co-founder of Netlify, the web development platform, published examples of "Agent Experience (AX)" in action with concrete examples from Clerk, Prisma, Linear, and HubSpot.