swyxio/devtools-angels

devtools-angels

Active angel investors in developer tools!

There is no particular order here but we aim to be high caliber level 1 angels.

Dealflow

This list has already helped connect startup founders to angels!

Confirmed investments:

• Utopia.app
• Supabase.io
• Nhost.io
• Makelog
• Cased
• Tangram
• 100ms
• Railway
• Stackblitz
• Everfund
• Medusa
• E2B.dev
• Tramline.app
• Langbase
• Daytona
• (we've lost count...)

Intros made for: EdgeDB, Lambdragon, Cloudthread, Fiberplane, Developer Acceleration, Apptim, Metricsbird.io, Onboardbase, Platformatic, Skytable, Palette.dev, Vyne, Kombai.io, Bandar Systems, Second.dev, Leap Labs, DeeptrustAI...

We also have founders in the community who have listed their own raises: Recursal.ai, Mycelial, Ivy DL, Flightcontrol...

And we sometimes meet up IRL! :)

For dev industry tracking see sw-yx/tracking.

Discord

We share dealflow in Discord (invite only) for now but may setup a newsletter/no-fee syndicate someday.

Angels

No particular order, please don't read anything into the ordering

• swyx - site, twitter, email

  Head of Developer Experience at Temporal, ex AWS, Netlify, Two Sigma. Writer (swyx.io) and Dev community organizer /r/reactjs, Svelte Society, and Coding Career. I do $5-15k personal checks and $25-100k scout checks in devtools startups (so far, in backend-platforms-for-frontend-devs, community engagement, frontend debugging, low code visual builders). Examples - Circle, Replay.io, Supabase, Flutterflow, EdgeDB, Chroma), MatX.

• David Mytton - site, twitter, podcast, email

  I'm co-founder of Console, a place for developers to find the best tools. I invest around $25k in early stage devtools / devops / cloud related startups and can help specifically with getting your first users/customers, and with hiring engineers. From 2009-2018, I was CEO at Server Density, a SaaS infrastructure monitoring startup acquired by StackPath, a US-based edge computing business. I am a researcher in sustainable computing at Uptime Institute and affiliated with Imperial College London. I'm also an EIR at Seedcamp.

• Moritz Plassnig - site / twitter

  I founded/sold Codeship and write angel + scout fund checks ($5-25K) in data or dev tool startups. First check or seed/A preferred. I don't care who else invests and geo is irrelevant as long as it's a reasonable legal entity. I can help best with everything product, go2market, company strategy, fundraising, and ceo/exec coaching. DM on Twitter is best for reaching out.

• Max Stoiber - site

  I irregularly angel invest small checks ($2500-$5000) of my own money in early-stage startups I'm excited about. Think of me as an advisor with skin in the game — I love helping with tricky, ambiguous problems, providing access to my network and audience, or even just lending an ear to founders building exciting new things.

• Michael Grinich - DM

  I’m a technologist. I studied CS at MIT and still write code. When I invest, I specifically look for technical founders building dev tools, API platforms, and “unloved” workflow cloud SaaS. I founded both Nylas and WorkOS and worked at Dropbox so this is an area I know well. My typical check size is around $100k but I can flex and get creative for bigger rounds too. If I invest, I will offer introductions to other investors I know (and like). This can help fill out a larger round. more here

• Beyang Liu - site, DM, podcast

  I enjoy helping dev tool creators build top-notch teams, figure out go-to-market, and meet other great investors. I've been working on developer tools for most of the past decade as CTO and co-founder of Sourcegraph. I host a podcast featuring creators of dev tools--if you've built something you'd love to share with the developer world, I'd love to have you on the show!

• David Yang - site

  I co-founded Fullstack Academy which has trained thousands of developers. Currently investing $25-50K checks in devtools, low-code/no-code and ed-tech.

• Brian Douglas - site

  I am connected to the Heavybit Accelerator in San Francisco and work in the Developer Relations at GitHub. I invest my own money into early-stage startups and excited to learn about new Developer Tools.

• Brianne Kimmel - twitter, Worklife.vc

  Worklife.vc, investor in Mux, WorkOS, Webflow, Stytch and more!

• Ellen Chisa - twitter, site, BoldStart.vc

  Cofounder at Dark, Lola, and early Kickstarter/Office Mobile. I advise and invest small checks in startups. I invest in companies where I'm excited about the founders, want to learn something about the space, and see a way for me to add value. I'm also a founder in residence at Boldstart and support Oliners through parcelb.vc.

• Christina Cordova - twitter

  Head of Product @ Notion

• Stephanie Friedman - twitter

  Xamarin, Netlify, Tailscale, etc

• Michael Rybintsev - site, DM

  Infrastructure consulting, factotum at Scrimba, previously an engineer at Huddle and HT2 Labs. Interested in devtools and edtech.

• Manuel Weiss - twitter, site

  Developer Marketing B2B Consultant, previously cofounder at Codeship (acquired by CloudBees) I am an angel investor and advisor to dev startups in the pre-seed and seed stage. I sign $5k-$10k tickets and invest in founders and their companies where I can provide proven value. I'm a pro-active, hands-on angel with a founder background that can help with Developer Marketing + B2B Sales.

• Dion Almaer - twitter

  Director, Web Developer Ecosystem at Google. I lead product for developer tools such as Chrome DevTools, and have been in the developer tooling space for most of my career, e.g. building Bespin and co-leading developer tools at Mozilla, working on the webOS developer ecosystem, and multiple startups. I have been an angel investor for the last decade, and love working with developer-oriented platform and tooling companies. As an LP I work with one of the best VCs in the open source and developer space, Uncorrelated.

• Brian Lovin - site, twitter, learning

  I'm a product designer currently working on the mobile apps at GitHub. I love working with developers, building developer tools, and working with early stage companies that need design help. I write $5-10k checks and only invest when I feel confident that I'm going to provide real value to founders. My value will primarily come from design and product feedback, helping with hiring processes (writing job descriptions, reviewing portfolios, etc.), and helping early design hires ramp up with external support.

• Eugene Yan - site, twitter

  Applied Science at Amazon. Previously led data science at Lazada (acquired by Alibaba) and ucare.ai. I write $10 - 20k checks for dev tools in the data and ML space (deployment, testing, monitoring, etc.); also e-commerce and ed-tech. In addition to investing, I also help with advising and intros to other tech advisors and VCs.

• Zeno Rocha - site, twitter

  I'm a developer experience aficionado. I have a deep understanding of the enterprise market and open source software. Co-founded Liferay Cloud and built some popular projects such as clipboard.js and Dracula. I can help with branding, product strategy, and go-to-market. I invest small checks in developer-first startups.

• Kenneth Auchenberg - site, twitter

  Developer Products @ Stripe. I write $5-25k checks, and are a part of a larger community of angels via developers.vc. If you're building something that is empowering people to build, increase productivity, avoid repetition, ship faster, or something of this along these lines. I want to talk to you. developers.vc

• Tigran Hakobyan - site, twitter

  I'm a senior software engineer at Netflix working on developer tools and productivity. I love working with early-stage companies that are building tools that shape how developers work and ship software. I write $5-10k checks and invest in companies that I strongly believe in. I can help with product strategy and engineering work.

• Sankalp Agarwal - site, twitter

  I'm a product designer specialising in Enterprise SaaS and DevTools. I was an early design leader, product manager in Postman and now I help developer-makers create a better experience for their products. My focus is not so much on dev tools as it is on collaboration between developers. Typical checks are $1-5K. I can help with design hiring, or any remote tech-related roles from India.

• Tracy Lee - site, personal site, twitter

  I'm the CEO of This Dot Labs, on the RxJS Core Team, Google Developer Expert, Microsoft MVP, and a serial entrepreneur that sold a tech startup before deciding to learn how to code. My focus is investing in awesome teams and ideas in the developer space. The easiest way to reach me is by DMing me on twitter!

• Patrick Thompson - site, twitter

  Director of Product at Amplitude. Previously co-founder/CEO of Iteratively (acquired by Amplitude). Before that managed teams at Atlassian. I write $10-25k checks and love working with early-stage companies helping software teams build better products. I help with product strategy, fundraising, hiring, and early customer introductions.

• Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent – twitter

  Founder of the Design Tokens W3C Community Group. Worked on DesignOps and design systems at Salesforce, Shopify, BBC, Guardian, and Financial Times. I write $2.5-20k checks and advise companies building tools that lower the bar for DesignOps and design systems. I can help with product strategy, usability, introduction to talent and potential customers.

• Chang Xu - site, twitter

  Partner at Basis Set and organizer at Dev Founders, a community of founders building tools for developers, ML, data science, designers, and creators. Previously founder & product manager. I write checks anywhere from $100k-3M and invest at preseed / seed stage.

• Ilya Lyamkin - site, twitter

  I'm a senior software engineer at Spotify working on developer platform and productivity. I'm excited about early stage startups focused on dev tools, developer productivity and fintech. I write $5-25k checks and invest in teams that can turn complex problem into simple solution. My value will come from product strategy, engineering work, and hiring.

• Thomas Schranz - site, twitter, github

  Working on Jam, an open source implementation of Clubhouse-like audio rooms. I'm into functional programming, machine learning, array programming languages (APL, j, q, k), no-code, command line interfaces, hosting platforms, databases, developer user-experience. I write $5-50k checks, typically pre-launch. Love working with early-stage teams on product strategy, community, marketing, branding, design, business model, hiring. StarCraft II amateur.

• Alessio Fanelli - site, twitter

  I invest in the Engineering Value Chain Revolution at 645 Ventures, as well as leading our engineering and data team. I also personally angel invest in infra, dev tools, security, and blockchain tech. I previously founded Smart Torvy, an open source home automation ecosystem, and was a lead engineer at early stage companies like Welcome Tech. I contribute to different open source projects on GitHub as well as writing about open source monetization, community management, and more. You can reach me on Twitter or at afanelli[at]645ventures.com

• Shinji Kim & Jack McCloy - Shinji, Jack

  Shinji's the founder of Select Star and sold her prior company to Akamai. Jack is an engineer who leads the Design Systems team at Amplitude. We focus on b2b SaaS, data tools, and infrastructure / dev tools. Typically we invest $5-15k at a time and can help with fundraising, product strategy, pricing, hiring, and early stage go-to-market.

• Charlie Marsh - site, twitter

  Staff software engineer at Spring Discovery, leading the development of the software and data platforms (everything from ETL to our internal ML frameworks to the front-end applications our scientists use to understand high-content biological + computer vision data). I invest through the Caffeinated Capital Collective Fund writing $100k+ checks at the pre-seed and seed stages. I'm fortunate enough to spend most of my working hours writing code and am interested in anything that makes it easier + faster to build better products.

• Alfonso Subiotto - email site, twitter, github, technical writing

  Previously swe/tech lead at Cockroach Labs from Series A to E focused on distributed execution engines and performance. Now investing in data & developer tools with personal checks in the $1-10k range at the pre-seed/seed stage. I also invest with Lorimer Ventures who write $100k+ checks. I/we can help with anything from technical writing/interviewing to GTM/pricing strategy.

• Luke Michael Byrne - site, twitter

  I invest in pre-seed & seed stage developer tools & infrastructure at Tapestry VC. I split my time here between investing, working with portfolio companies & writing code (building internal data tools), and hack on a lot of side projects in my free time. I occasionally write about technologies that excite me & angel invest in the same areas. If you'd like to chat, feel free to email me or book some time to chat.

• Ekene Eze - site, twitter

  As the Founding Director of Developer Experience at Plasmic I split my time organizing and executing our DevRel strategies and establishing + managing partner relationships. I also writing code / create educational content for developers of all experience levels and hack on side projects in my free time. I occasionally write about technologies that excite me and hoping to angel invest in the same areas. If you'd like to chat, you can email me or book some time with me.

• Desigan Chinniah - site, twitter

  I am a technologist with over two-decades of dot-com experiences, including Mozilla since Firefox 3.8 in early 2010. I invest early and have a small portfolio of developer related projects including Replay, Athens, Axiom, Kibo School and Zama. I am also a member of the board of the Tor Project. You've come this far, say hello.

• Bukky Adebayo - site, twitter

  I am a PM with a decade of product experience across data analytics and dev tools product. I'm currently the product lead for HashiCorp's Waypoint, a application delivery platform. I also invest in developer tools as a scout for Greylock. Previously, I was a product manager at GitHub where I helped build Secret Scanning and Security Overview. I also served as a tech policy advisor to US Senator Tom Udall. If you'd like to chat, you email me or book time with me

• Kareem Kouddous - twitter

  Founder & CTO at Suzy, Founder & CTO at Koko which sold to Airbnb and then relaunched as a non-profit (one of the two as part of YC W22). My superpower has always been figuring out how to build the least amount of product possible by finding tools and services to offload work to. At Airbnb I conceived and lead major projects to bring in vendors so that the relatively small trust and safety team could focus on truly unique problems to solve. I invest in early stage 10-20k checks, mainly focused on devtools but also technology that can meaninfully make a positive difference to society. I code almost every day, most recently falling in love with Rust. Feel free to email me or book time with me.

• Gyan Kapur - site, twitter

  I run a fund that is focused on B2B software including developer tools, data infrastructure, and DevOps. Fairly polyglot in the developer space, started writing code actively (Perl) back in 2000 when I was 13 and have build some distributed pricing systems for synthetic credit and currency exotic options in the early 2010s when we called the cloud "the grid."

• Thomas Cuvelier - email, twitter

  I invest in pre-seed and seed devtool and datatool companies with Alven (Algolia, Grafbase, Dataiku, etc.), and selectively in web3 tooling (i.e. NFTport). I have been coding for derivatives trading desks since 2005, and have built internal data tooling for asset managers since then. I angel invest $5-25k in technologies that excite me, and mainly support the European ecosystem. Love working closely with founders on product strategy, GTM, key hires, fundraising and market intel and connectivity.

• Cassidy Williams - site, twitter, linkedin

  I invest in developer-focused startups who have diverse teams, good ideas, and exciting tech. DMing me on Discord (cassidoo#0001) or Twitter is the fastest way to reach me!

• Ivan Burazin - twitter, linkedin

  Co-Founder & CEO at Daytona. Previously co-founded Codeanywhere (the first cloud IDE) and Shift (Europe’s largest dev conference, acquired by Infobip). Now building one of the fastest-growing infrastructure companies, focused on agent-native compute. I invest $1–10k checks in startups building in the AI Enablement Stack—from devtools to middleware to Agents themselves. As a founder and operator, I can help with GTM, fundraising, and positioning your company.

Angel Alums

Paused Investing but still open to chat/want to be on our list.

None currently! 🎉