London-based developer platform Raycast has raised $15m (£11.2m) in a Series A funding round led by Coatue and Accel.
Raycast said it will use the proceeds of the funding round to “double down” on growing its developer community and tools and make the platform available to teams of developers.
Founded in 2020 by former Facebook software engineers Thomas Paul Mann and Petr Nikolaev, Raycast’s platform provides software developers with tools to reduce context switching, when a computer process is suspended and reaccessed later.
Raycast also received backing from angel investors such as Johnny Boufarhat, CEO and founder of Hopin; Jeff Weinstein, Product at Stripe; Jason Warner, former CTO of GitHub; Ott Kaukver, CTO of Checkout.com and ex-CTO of Twilio, among others.
“We’re also incredibly excited to, for the first time, grant early access to our new team features, and we hope it can make building and distributing internal tools even easier for businesses as well as individuals,” said Raycast CEO Thomas Paul Mann said.
Over the past 12 months, Raycast has grown its daily active user base to over 11,000 from 130 in October last year. These users have performed over 20 million actions on the platform.
Andrei Brasoveanu, partner at Accel, said: “Since leading Raycast’s seed investment, we’ve been impressed with the growth and traction Raycast has seen in the developer community. This backs up our initial belief that Raycast has the potential to become an indispensable tool for developers, and we’re excited to see the team go even further with the launch of the API and Store and expansion to teams.”
Raycast launches Extensions API and Store
Besides the funding round, Raycast also launched its Extensions API and Store in public beta, giving developers the ability to build custom extensions in less than 30 minutes and share them with their team or community to speed up common tasks. Within a month, the community built over 100 extensions on the beta, connecting to services like Figma, GitHub, Chrome, Notion, YouTube, Twitter and more.
Raycast is publicly launching the Extensions API and Store, opening it up to developers around the world and enabling the creation of a truly global ecosystem of productivity tools.
David Cahn, partner at Coatue, said: “Too many developers are losing time that could be spent on core work because they’re jumping between non-coding tasks or searching for information across different SaaS tools. We feel Raycast offers a powerful platform for developers to speed up common tasks.”
