Cortex: Internal Developer Portal Company Closes $35 Million In Series B

By Amit Chowdhry ● Jun 6, 2023

Cortex – a leading internal developer portal (IDP) – announced $35 million in Series B funding led by IVP with participation from Craft Ventures in addition to existing investors Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global and Y Combinator. IVP general partner Cack Wilhelm joins the Cortex board of directors. This new funding round will enable Cortex to deepen integrations and automation, in an effort to build the world’s most connected and intuitive IDP.

Cortex has been seeing a record-breaking year with 400% YoY revenue growth and new deployments in enterprise companies including TripAdvisor, Docker, Grammarly, Unity, and SoFi that use Cortex to quickly collect, contextualize, and templatize development best practices. And the increased demand for Cortex has been fueled by an industry-wide shift to service-oriented architectures that are increasingly difficult to manage at scale.

Cortex’s industry-first approach for incentivizing adoption has also driven significant momentum in audiences already familiar with alternative commercial or open source IDPs.

Cortex was designed to give engineering teams comprehensive visibility and control over their microservices ecosystem. And the Cortex Service Catalog is easily-integrated with engineering teams’ favorite tools, making it easy for them to organize critical information about their services and understand their dependencies.

— Cortex Scorecards and Initiatives enables teams to define standards and prescribe paths to improvement, measuring production readiness and development maturity.

— Cortex Scaffolder and Actions enable teams to quickly build and deploy new services according to best practice.

The Cortex platform as a whole provides a single-pane-of-glass to visualize ownership, and impact lasting organizational change.

KEY QUOTES:

“Developer productivity tops the list of engineering initiatives given the current macro, but while AI is speeding up developer work, time spent remediating issues risks cannibalizing any efficiency gains, Cortex has quickly become critical to many enterprises by eliminating the quality/velocity challenge – arming devs with the tools they need to work well, fast. We’re partnering with Cortex at this critical juncture to help them accelerate their growth as they support organizations on their journey to engineering excellence.”

— IVP general partner Cack Wilhelm

“Engineering teams are showing strong recognition of the importance of IDPs, and are committed to deploying and driving their adoption across their entire organizations. Our platform provides a guided, yet flexible experience – bridging the gaps left by open source alternatives and an amalgamation of adjacent technologies like APMs, CI/CD, and metric monitors. Cortex helps teams understand what’s wrong and incentivizes improvement to drive a culture of ownership, reliability, and continuous improvement.”

— Ganesh Datta, Cortex co-founder and CTO

“We initially chose Cortex to help us better align and document our services, but soon realized the full potential of the platform. We now have org-wide initiatives; to create a ‘golden path’ for developers, and to ensure healthy ‘golden metrics’ for our services. Cortex facilitates both in a way that just wasn’t possible before, allowing us to define standards for service quality, actively steer developers towards improvement, and bootstrap new projects. In turn, these initiatives directly impact developer productivity and provide visibility to several teams across reliability, security, platform, and leadership.”

— Scott Dunbar, SVP Engineering Enablement, Sportradar

“As career engineers with plenty of microservice horror stories, we built Cortex to help other developers abstract away the hardest parts of maintaining quality services, and to prove that doing so would predictably and measurably increase the pace of developer productivity at every organization. With the help of our customers and the support and guidance they have provided, we have moved well beyond building the best service maturity platform to lead the market in IDPs. We are lucky to partner with such leading enterprises and are humbled by the rapid momentum that the platform has gained. We can’t wait to show the industry what’s next.”

— Anish Dhar, co-founder and CEO of Cortex