Today, we’re excited to open up sign-ups for the beta of Coherence, the first Developer Experience Platform, and announce $3.9M in seed funding led by First Round Capital to take the “yak shaving” and configuration whack-a-mole problem and make it ours — not yours. We’re building the software we’d want for our own development team — from first principles.
We believe that too much tech talent and time is wasted on rebuilding the same solutions to the same problems. How many times have you had to rebuild a CI pipeline or ask someone for help with a broken development environment (and the docs are stale)? Or wait to have someone look at your PR because staging wasn’t available or was in an incomplete state? How hard is it for you to run integration tests locally? We’d take the over on a bet that as much as 30% of an average engineering team’s time is spent on this and other related DevOps “yak-shaving.” Software development shouldn’t require so much configuration and coordination.
A rainforest of specific tools, often delivered as a service, has evolved to solve these problems — from Infrastructure as Code to CI/CD platforms. This recent explosion in vendor count is not sustainable, nor is it logical from a supply chain/reliability/security point of view. Plus, the context switching it requires of individual developers disrupts day to day rhythm — keeping your sprints littered with juggling different configuration files and unexpected maintenance burdens.
Coherence is an integrated toolkit that automates the development, deployment, and management of container-based full-stack web apps on AWS and Google Cloud. You can sign up to test out one of our sandbox accounts or quickly get a new app started with one of our ready-to-go templates. With one simple yaml configuration, you get an integrated dashboard with Cloud Development Environments, managed CI/CD, and full-stack preview environments for each branch. A developer can write, test, review and deploy code from one interface with best practices built in. Developers are intuitively navigated to their cloud’s resources when needed, eliminating time spent searching other interfaces for every log or metric you need. Coherence includes development environments alongside staging and production environments in the same experience.
We want teams to say goodbye to messy local configs across devices and to stop spending time debugging homegrown glue-code. Unlike the PaaS category defined by Heroku, our goal is to help teams leverage the platforms provided by the best cloud providers, keeping the benefits of running in your own cloud account: unlimited extensibility, cost savings, compliance with audit requirements, and freedom to easily exit our platform without an impact to your systems. Coherence offers a 10x simpler way for companies to close the loop from dev to production.
We’re incredibly grateful to the teams that took an early bet on our product and have been using it this past spring and summer. “Coherence provided us with a best in class development workflow out of the box from day zero,” says Cubby CTO, Adam Flemming. “Instead of spending time setting up and maintaining our gitops workflow, we've been able to focus on building our v1 and establishing product market fit.”
In addition to First Round Capital, we’re also honored to have the support of Flybridge Capital, RRE Ventures, 25Madison, and Correlation Ventures, as well as angels including Jean-Denis Graze of Plaid, Kate Ryder of Maven Clinic, Myles Kleeger of Braze, and a great roster of other supporters.
The product we’re offering today is just the beginning of our Developer Experience platform. Our most important goal is to put guardrails around your SDLC. Things like pre-code workflows, deployment approvals, and compliance workflows that output audit evidence into your SOC2/HITRUST/ISO27001 process are all on the roadmap. We’re also going to be supporting a wider variety of apps with more deployment “flavors” - as we outline in this post we’re really looking forward to the serverless apps that we believe we can improve the most using tech like Lambda. Last, we’re working hard to make migrating your app onto Coherence as easy as possible.
Sign up and let us improve your developer experience today.
