John and Patrick Collison. Image: Stripe
Founded by former Uber and Twilio engineers, Cortex is an internal developer portal designed to make developers more productive.
Developer start-up Cortex has raised $60m in funding with backing from Sequoia, Y Combinator and Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison.
The Series C funding round was led by Scale Ventur Partners and, according to Bloomberg, puts the company’s value at $470m. The fresh funding will be used to invest in its platform capabilities with enhanced workflows, engineering intelligence, user interface and AI.
Cortex was founded in 2019 by Anish Dhar, Ganesh Datta and Nikhil Unni, all of whom have a background in engineering at well-known tech companies including Uber and Twilio.
The start-up aims to solve the problem of ‘service sprawl’ for engineering teams – where a ‘shipping faster’ mantra can lead to a steep decline in quality and consistency.
“I saw this firsthand while I was at Uber, where the problem of service sprawl had far-reaching consequences,” said Dhar in a blogpost.
“Manually managing hundreds of custom-built services named after Star Wars characters with missing documentation, unknown owners and questionable data sounds like a dystopian pre-cloud problem, but we were well past that milestone in 2017. And it’s only getting worse for other tech-forward businesses.”
Cortex aims to tackle this issue with its internal developer portal, providing users with resource catalogues and continuous monitoring for standards such as language-specific best practices and package freshness. Companies that use the portal include Skyscanner, TripAdvisor and Adobe.
Eric Anderson of Scale Venture Partners is also joining Cortex’s board and said the world’s largest enterprises are betting on the start-up.
“We’re investing in Cortex because it’s solving two mission-critical issues for engineering teams: centralising the information needed to understand, operate and build new software, and creating a culture of engineering excellence and continuous improvement,” he said.
Cortex has been steadily building its funding since it was founded in 2021, with seed rounds in its early years followed by a $15m Series A round in 2021. The company then scored a $35m investment in May of last year.
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