Netlify has raised millions for its own efforts to build a developer-centric service to enable Jamstack development. Now Netlify wants to prepay it and today announces the first investment round for its Jamstack Innovation Fund.
jam stack is an emerging developer stack that integrates Javascript, APIs, and Markup (the JAM in Jamstack) for web applications. Netlify is one of the pioneers of Jamstack, raising $105 million in a Series D financing round in November 2021, giving the company a $2 billion valuation.
The Netlify platform provides developers with a service to deploy and manage Jamstack applications built with a growing ecosystem of tools. To help grow the ecosystem, Netlify started its Jamstack Innovation Fund with $100,000 investments in each of 10 different startups. The investments will be complemented by consulting and support services from Netlify in an effort to raise awareness of the startups and ultimately bring more capabilities to Jamstack platforms, such as Netlify.
The 10 startups in the first funding round include the chisel stroke data platform; clerk authentication; Clutch, which provides Jamstack development for small businesses; state management company Convex† GraphQL mesh supplier Take shape† database replication company Snaplet† Vue.js framework provider NuxtLabs† fundraising tools provider everfund† backend mobile app provider Tigris data† and JavaScript runtime platform supplier Not†
“We have a strong focus on companies that provide web developers with tools to build in a better way,” Christian Bach, co-founder of Netlify, told VentureBeat. “If you look at the companies we’ve invested in, they all offer some sort of service that brings out the possibilities of building with the Jamstack in a composable way for the modern web.”
Deno tries to reinvent JavaScript
While all the companies Netlify invests in are startups, some are a bit further along than others. One such vendor is Deno, which announced on June 21 that it had raised a $21 million round of financing. Netlify was a minor entrant in the round, which was led by Sequoia.
Netlify already uses Deno within its platform, as the underlying JavaScript runtime technology that helps its Netlify Edge Features service announced on April 19.
“Everybody’s pushing everything to the limit, that’s a big trend for the web, but if you look at it, there’s a lot of kind of proprietary standards out there,” Bach said.
Bach noted that Deno was a open source technology and benefits from being an open development community. He added that Deno makes it easier for web developers to build software with JavaScript, with the ability to embed a JavaScript runtime wherever website code and applications run.
Deno’s JavaScript engine also supports WebAssembly, an emerging open standard that allows code written in any language to run on the same runtime engine. Bach said he thinks it’s too early for WebAssembly, and he’s excited to see where the technology will end up.
Bringing More Data to Jamstack Applications
One of the key themes reflected in the companies Netlify has invested in is the need to help connect web applications to data.
Chiselstrike is one such startup. Chiselstrike, based in London, Ontario, Canada, was founded in 2021 and provides back-end application capabilities as a service. Snaplet, based in Berlin, Germany, also launched in 2021, aims to solve another problem by helping Jamstack developers easily access PostgreSQL-based databases. Bach noted that web developers often struggle with databases and that there is a need to simplify the process within a Jamstack implementation.
Data also enters Jamstack applications through APIs (application programming interfaces). The REST API protocol is ubiquitous on the web today, but is beginning to be supplanted by the emerging GraphQL API standard. Netlify invests in GraphQL startup TakeShape, which was founded in Brooklyn in 2017 with the goal of making it easier for web developers to take advantage of GraphQL.
Netlify is no stranger to the GraphQL world. In addition to the financing announcement in November 2021, Netlify also announced the acquisition of GraphQL supplier OneGraph.
“Netlify has a very strong view that GraphQL is an API technology that is absolutely necessary,” said Bach.
Return and prepay
While the goal of Netlify’s investments is to empower Jamstack developers, it also invests in Everfund, which is a bit of a different platform.
“Everfund is essentially trying a Stripe, but for donations,” Bach said. “Non-profit information is something that many developers actually touch.”
Bach noted that during the pandemic, the market for donations of all kinds usually went online. What has become clear to him and Everfund is that there is a need for an open platform to enable donation processing.
“That whole industry needs a major overhaul of how they do things and to make it as easy as possible for nonprofits to roll out on the Internet,” Bach said. “I think Everfund has a great vision for that.”