nxA startup that develops tools to simplify the work of software development teams within a single code repository, today closed a $16 million Series A round with participation from Nexus Venture Partners and a16z.
The funds will be used to expand Nx’s fully managed product, Nx Cloud, to be more of a replacement for existing continuous integration tools, as Jenkins co-founder and CEO Jeff Cross told TechCrunch in an email interview. .
“By having the entire development workforce remote during the pandemic, companies realized the problems and overhead of siled development, and the benefits of using permanent ‘monorepos’ instead,” Cross said. “Many companies claim they can solve every aspect of the developer experience, overwhelming decision makers with too many options. “Our approach is more prescriptive and narrower in focus.”
Before launching Nx, Cross and Nx’s other co-founder, Victor Savkin, worked at Google on the Angular team, the team responsible for maintaining the Angular framework for building web applications. They left Google to start an Angular consulting business in 2016, but say they saw a pressing need for tools that make it simpler for developers to store apps and related libraries in a shared code repository.
“We created the open source build system, Nx,” Cross said. “Most of our attention is focused on the JavaScript ecosystem, but Nx is language agnostic and can build anything. Developers can write private or open source plugins to enhance support for specific languages or frameworks, much like the first-class plugins maintained by the core Nx team.”
The main Nx product is a cloud-hosted version of Nx, the aforementioned Nx Cloud.
“The core value of Nx and Nx Cloud is that we help product development teams deliver more features faster,” Cross said. “We do this by making it easy to move all parts of a product into a single repository… Nx and Nx Cloud then have multiple layers of intelligence to quickly build (i.e. convert a repository into a running application) by building only the that is needed. built, caching task results whenever possible and then distributing the work optimally.”
Now, so-called monorepos confer advantages, such as ease of reuse and optimized collaboration between teams. But they also have disadvantages, such as needing additional storage by default and lack of per-project access control.
That is, monorepos may not be for everyone. But there is a customer base crying out for it: Nx, which has a team of 37, claims to have hundreds of subscribers and more than 15 million installations of the Nx open source project per month.
“We have more than doubled our business customers and quintupled our software-as-a-service revenue,” Cross said. “We have over two years of track record and strong traction with enterprise clients, and we continue to hire to keep up with our incoming pipeline of enterprise deals.”
