- Developer social network DEV announced it raised $11.5 million in Series A funding led by Mayfield with participation from OSS Capital and Charge VC
DEV — the creators of the fastest-growing social network for developers — announced it raised $11.5 million in Series A funding led by Mayfield with participation from existing investors including OSS Capital and Charge VC. And DEV is also known for operating a social network for software developers built entirely on open-source software.
DEV believes that the future of the social network is distributed open-source technology established on trust and transparency and so the company has built a technology platform that does not track users, centralize control, or hoard user data.
With this round of funding, DEV plans to expand the development of its technology platform to provide an inclusive space for software developers all over the world. In conjunction with this funding round, Navin Chaddha and Vivek Saraswat from Mayfield are joining DEV’s Board of Directors.
DEV was built to serve programmers of all backgrounds and experience levels who are looking for a community experience beyond code collaboration and troubleshooting advice. And DEV members get together to publish work, participate in conversations, elevate their skills, and support each other in a community environment.
In order to ensure that DEV remains inclusive to all community members regardless of their background, the founders have created a diverse moderator pool who work together to ensure constructive dialogue is emphasized over pedantic arguments and harassment. And DEV currently serves more than 5 million unique visitors a month with more than 250,000 active signed up members.
“We started with a simple, but daunting, mission of bringing truly inclusive community to the software industry. As the field of software development goes mainstream, it is unacceptable that gatekeeping, discouragement and harassment remain so deeply ingrained in the culture,” said DEV co-founder Ben Halpern. “Having deeply important core values begets more values and as we collaborated with the community, we discovered the incredibly positive impact we could develop through leaning into open source for the purpose of transparency and trust. It has been an incredibly fulfilling journey of creating change in the tech world.”
DEV’s distributed community of thousands of developers is also known to regularly contribute issue reports, fix bugs, and build features thus helping create an increasingly valuable and self-reinforcing resource for software developers.
“We found the DEV founders inspiring in their mission to bring open source to the masses and solve problems with centralization and consolidation in social media,” added Chaddha. “Similar to the Hashicorp team, which leveraged the vision of its founders into a high-velocity business, DEV has built the fastest-growing, most inclusive social network for the software industry. We believe this is the next paradigm for community building, and are honored to partner with Ben, Peter and Jess on their journey.”
DEV’s platform is bringing open-source technology all the way to the end-user in order to foster trust. Plus the organization allows anyone to run its code and envision a future where social media is made up of separate, but compatible communities of different shapes and sizes.
These separate community networks will empower hobbyist clubs, fanbases, friend circles, workplaces, and groups to thrive on a modern platform without handing over their data to massive technology corporations.
“At Vue Vixens, we love DEV because it allows us to reach a new audience with quality Vue-focused content. DEV is our official blog and we really enjoy interfacing with folks on the comments, which tend to have a very positive vibe,” commented Jen Looper, Cloud Developer Advocate Lead at Microsoft and founder of VueVixens.org
