Bringing the developer experience to the cloud: Our investment in Coder
By: Alex Bard
As I reflect on Redpoint’s journey so far with Coder, I recall the first email John Andrew, one of the company’s founders, sent to us. It was 2018 and the Coder team was raising their first round of financing. John Andrew contacted a handful of venture firms, all of which had partnered with developer-focused companies that the Coder team admired. He wrote to us because of our partnership with LaunchDarkly. In that email, John Andrew wrote:
“My name is John Andrew, 20 years old, co-founder of Coder.com (25 or so person startup in Austin). Our goal is to remove the limitations of local machines for software engineers, and I think you may appreciate what we’ve built, and where we are going.
Right now we have a browser-based IDE that is miles ahead of what’s out there (you can check it out at coder.com) and have just started working on integrations into existing IDE’s like VSCode, making any IDE a cloud-powered one.
By doing this, we give engineers access to dynamically scaling resources, so they’re never bottlenecked by their local machine again. Increasing developer velocity, and exchanging cloud resources for their time.”
The email was personalized, thoughtful, and painted a big vision. In parallel, John Andrew emailed Andy McLoughlin at Uncork. Andy is a good friend of ours, and a seed investor Redpoint has co-invested with in the past. We discussed Coder and decided to pursue the opportunity together.
It’s hard not to be excited after meeting John Andrew, Kyle, and Ammar. They have been coding and building companies together since they were 13. They have tremendous instincts and boundless ambition, matched only by their curiosity.
Coder has developed open-source software and an enterprise platform that makes it easier than ever for organizations of all sizes to configure, secure, and scale development environments — dramatically increasing productivity. By combining innovations in productivity and security, Coder brings the development velocity of a startup to the modern enterprise.
And the software is beloved in the community. Fast forward two years and Coder has over 10 million Docker pulls and 35k GitHub stars, and is used by many of the world’s largest enterprises.
We feel so fortunate to have partnered with John Andrew, Kyle, and Ammar, and the entire Coder team at the seed round. Since then, we’ve deepened our partnership by leading the Series A and investing in their $30M Series B announced today.
It has been a truly special experience to witness the team grow, make hard decisions, embrace the enterprise, and build incredible momentum. We’re thrilled to be a part of what happens next!
