A platform which provides developers with quick access to their tools has raised £11.3 million in Series A funding and announced the public launch of its API and store.
Raycast was founded in 2020 by former Facebook software engineers Thomas Paul Mann (CEO) and Petr Nikolaev (CTO), who wanted to recover the time developers lose every day due to continuous context-switching between different SaaS tools.
They say Raycast makes it straightforward for developers to find and update information with its command line-inspired interface, enabling automation of day-to-day processes and tasks.
The round was led by Accel and Coatue. Also participating were angel investors Johnny Boufarhat, CEO and founder of Hopin; Jeff Weinstein, Product at Stripe; Jason Warner, former CTO of GitHub; and Ott Kaukver, CTO of Checkout.com and ex-CTO of Twilio.
The investment will be used to double down on building Raycast’s community of developers and tools, accelerate platform growth and, for the first time, bring Raycast to teams.
In just 12 months, the tool has quickly gained traction and grown its daily active user base from 130 in October 2020 to over 11,000, with more than 20 million actions performed on the platform in that time.
It 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.
In just one month, the community built more than 100 extensions on the beta, connecting to services like Figma, GitHub, Chrome, Notion, YouTube, Twitter and more.
From today, companies will be able to sign up for an early access programme to new team features. This will grant them the ability to create their own internal store, where they can build and distribute custom extensions, links and snippets specific to the needs of the team.
‘Dyslexia and deafness won’t stop me building a tech unicorn’
“We’ve been blown away by the response from our community since launching in public beta,” said Mann. “It’s always been our goal to create a platform and developer community based around productivity; and with today’s funding and the public launch of our API and store, we believe we’re well on our way to achieving that.
“Our community jumped on the API when it was in public beta, and we can’t wait to see what custom extensions they will build in the months to come. 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.”