(Bloomberg) -- Cortex Applications Inc., a startup that aims to help software developers be more efficient, has raised $60 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator and the co-founders of Stripe Inc.
The deal values the startup at $470 million, and was led by Scale Venture Partners. Eric Anderson, a partner at Scale, is joining the company’s board. Other investors included IVP and Stripe’s John and Patrick Collison.
The business was co-founded by Anish Dhar and Ganesh Datta, whose experiences as engineers at Uber Tecnologies Inc. and LendUp motivated them to build the product. Cortex offers what’s called an internal development portal, which allows staffers within a company to access the information and services they need to do their jobs. Dhar, who is the startup’s chief executive officer, said that the core mission of Cortex is to “make developers move faster.” Clients such as Adobe Inc., Grammarly Inc. and Opendoor Technologies Inc. use Cortex for their technical workforce.
“There’s never really been a central platform for engineering,” said Cack Wilhelm, a general partner at IVP and board member at Cortex, about why she initially invested. She said it is as necessary a product for developers as customer relationship management software is for sales managers.
Bogomil Balkansky, a partner at Sequoia Capital and Cortex board member, said the startup’s market opportunity is large and current systems need improvement. “We rely on software developers to create and operate nearly everything businesses and consumers touch daily, yet developers find it harder to ship software because they are hamstrung by a growing mess of infrastructure and services.”
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