Reo.Dev Raises $1.2M Pre-Seed - Building for Developer-Focused GTM

As we raise our pre-seed round, I wanted to pen my thoughts on Reo.Dev's origins, our journey for the last 6 months and what the future looks like.

Today, the team and I are extremely thrilled to announce that we have raised a $1.2M pre-seed round led by India Quotient. Notable angel investors include Adam Frankl, ex-VP marketing at JFrog and Sourcegraph, Savin Goyal of Netflix and Outerbounds and Shraddha Gupta of Hasura also participated in the round.

I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about why we're building at Reo.Dev and how we are defining the revenue intelligence category for developer-focussed companies.

Why are we building Reo.Dev?

Prior to Reo.Dev, I worked at a Developer focussed company (an API company) heading the business function, responsible for generating revenue. I observed potential developers from our potential customers engaging with our resources—asking questions in our Discord community, installing our GitHub SDK, using our sandbox, reading our technical docs, and experimenting with our APIs. The C-level executives we demoed for often tasked one or two developers on their team with assessing our products, making these developers as vital to us as the executives themselves.

This brought me to the realisation that sales processes at modern tech companies are evolving. Traditionally, business buyers were the primary decision-makers. However, an increasingly influential figure has emerged: the developer or technical user. We feel this shift necessitates a fundamental change in sales tools and strategies for a new go-to-market (GTM) approach, which we are actively developing.

This paradigm shift in purchasing behavior presents unique challenges and opportunities. Developers place greater trust in their own research and evaluations over interactions with sales teams, and hence want to talk less to them. However, their research and evaluations leave more fingerprints across the web than will ever be captured in a sales call. We wanted to build an engine that can look at millions of these fingerprints and intelligently decode such sales opportunities from them.

Reflecting on the past six months

We picked Commercial Open Source companies as our wedge market as we saw this was a very fast growing vertical with newer challenges that could be solved with a product like ours. We started with validating our idea with revenue leaders in some of the top open source Devtool companies across the globe, by deeply listening to them and built the product which today services customers across US, Canada, UK, Germany, Israel and more countries.

We built a product which is unique in many ways. Today the product tracks 1.5 million+ developer intent signals every month and discovers 45,000 accounts with sales opportunities. Few things stand out for Reo.Dev from other revenue intelligence tools:

1. Competitive Intel: Whenever developers have a tooling problem, the first thing they do is look for open source solutions. Hence most of our customers find intent signals in developer activities across open source projects they often compete or complement. We help them with identifying accounts that are actively exploring competing open-source options, revealing previously unseen opportunities. We are the only tool in the market today that does this!

2. Intel from Developer Docs: Developers evaluating a product go through technical docs. Hence, a lot of intent lies in the kind of documents being read by developers. Reo.Dev tracks the documentation pages visited and content consumption patterns helping our customers understand the intent of the prospect and evaluation stage (e.g. are they spending more time on Quickstart, or Guides or on API reference).

3. Package Manager Installations: Developers who are high intent usually install package managers or execute docker commands and code examples. Reo.Dev (and again we are the only tool in the market doing this!) identifies and tracks code executions with a single line of our Javascript that can be done by GTM teams themselves.

4. Cloud Product Usage: For developer-focused companies, product usage data can provide vital insights into the buying intent of the users. The unique challenge for these companies is that product usage data can sometimes be anonymous, or hard to combine with all other intent signals. Reo.Dev tracks essential product usage metrics—active users, usage time, engagement levels—to enhance sales and marketing's account-based outreach strategies.

5. Developer Funnels: Upon integrating data sources, we clearly started seeing trends and patterns that could help our customers learn which account is ready to buy from them right now. We built algorithms to identify the evaluation stages of developers within an organization. So we could identify whether the developers are at a discovery stage for a tool, in evaluation, building POCs or deploying code.

Top developer tool companies trust us

We’ve had phenomenal support from our customers who’ve trusted us and backed our vision from the early days. We onboarded leading DevTool companies, such as Lightbend, the creators of AKKA, backed by prominent investors like Dell Technologies Capital and Intel Capital.

We serve Unleash, the largest open-source feature flag platform; Ververica, the minds behind Apache Flink and now part of Alibaba Group; Outerbounds, which brought Metaflow to life at Netflix; and Aporia, a frontrunner in the ML observability space, among many others.

The patience, honesty, and valuable feedback from our customers have been instrumental in our growth. Thank you to each one of our customers. You are as much a part of Reo.Dev's journey as every member of our team.

We’re just getting started

Our mission remains simple. Help GTM teams accelerate sales using AI that identifies developer intent from vast data sources. We are proud of what we’ve built so far but we feel we’ve barely scratched the surface here. Here's what you can expect us to double down this year:

1. More value: Being an Intent tool places us right at the start of the value chain, which is a fantastic spot to be in. Why? Because it allows us to deliver unparalleled value right from the get-go. We're talking about giving you access to the most valuable accounts, direct contact details of active developers, and deep insights into the context and maturity of their activities. But here's where it gets even better: this position opens up incredible opportunities for us to enhance downstream value. This means we can significantly boost the efficiency of your outreach efforts, refine the messaging and content you send out, and help you create collaterals that are spot-on in terms of context.

2. More markets: We’re taking our learning from working with Open Source companies and now planning to enter other sectors such as Developer SaaS, Dev API and other Dev Infra companies which have the same buyers and hence similar challenges.

3. More Intel: Over the last six months, we've delved deep into our customers' data sources, uncovering patterns to understand developer activities. Our priorities for the next few quarters will be to enhance how our tool makes suggestions that guide users in interpreting developer behaviours for more effective sales outreach, and integrates more automated workflows.

I want to conclude with a note of thanks. A huge shoutout to our investors, customers, team members, and everyone who backed us since day one. Time to get back to the building board!