Dark Announces $3.5M in Seed Financing
Today we’re announcing that Dark has raised $3.5M in seed funding. We actually raised our funding back in 2017, and have been quietly building Dark for the last two years.
Our team has developed a holistic programming language, editor, and infrastructure. You write in the Dark language, using the Dark editor, and your program is hosted on Dark’s infrastructure. As a result, developers can code without thinking about infrastructure, and have near-instant deployment, which we’re calling deployless.
We’re in the process of coming out of stealth. So far you can read What is Dark, how Dark is a functional language, and how Dark allows deploys in 50ms.
We’ve been working closely with some early Dark customers over the last year, who have shipped entire products on Dark. Chase Olivieri built Altitude, a subscription SaaS providing personalized flight deals: “As a bootstrapper, Dark has allowed me to move fast and build Altitude without having to worry about infrastructure, scaling, or server management.”
Jessica Greenwalt’s team built Birb, a project tracking tool: “It only took us minutes to get started, and their tooling allowed us to understand how our application worked in production.”
Dark’s holistic combination of programming language, editor and infrastructure completely changes how developers code. For example, Dark records traces of production execution that developers use in the Dark editor. Chase says: “I love the traces feature, which allows me to see live data while creating new endpoints or making changes on the backend. There is nothing else like it out there.”
We raised the $3.5m to develop Dark from an experienced set of investors. The round was led by Cervin Ventures with participation from Boldstart, Data Collective, Harrison Metal, XFactor, Backstage, Nextview, Promus, Correlation, 122 West, and Yubari. We’ve also been lucky to have a great set of angel investors who have provided guidance and feedback, and support, including James Tamplin (founder and CEO of Firebase), Eric Ries (Lean Startup, CEO LTSE), Edith Harbaugh (CEO of LaunchDarkly), Erica Brescia (COO of GitHub, founder Bitnami), Greg Brockman (Founder and CTO of OpenAI, former CTO of Stripe), and Andrew Miklas (founder of Pagerduty).*
We’d like to highlight XFactor and Backstage Capital. These funds see investing in underrepresented founders as an economic opportunity. We share their values and are proud to have their participation.
We’re excited to show the community what we’ve been building with this support. In September, we’ll be transitioning into beta. If you’re attending Strangeloop, we’d love to see you at our launch party on Friday September 13th: https://darklang.com/launch. Otherwise, we’ll be unveiling the product publicly on September 16th. Sign up at https://darklang.com to get notified when we release.
*Thank you to all of the angels who invested in Dark’s seed round: David Eckstein, Christina Cacioppo, Paul English, Pete Koomen, Hiten Shah, Nitesh Banta, Phillip Bond, Darragh Buckley, Albert Ni, Greg Brockman, Andrew Miklas, Sam Stokes, Russ Smith, Bryan Jowers, David Chang, Jean-Denis Greze, Kyle Wild, Thomson Nguyen, Mathew Johnson, Teck Chia, Lucas Nealan, Edith Harbaugh, James Tamplin, Dave Concannon, Eric Ries, Brendan Ciecko, Elizabeth Dobrska, Brad Flora, Jon Dahl, Shalini Agarwal, Sheel Mohnot, John McGugan, Jon Scherr, Jonathan Siegel, and our AngelList syndicate led by Ed Roman.