Here at Norwest, we’ve been laser-focused on businesses that improve the developer experience. Prior investments in companies like Harness and Amplication follow a theme of identifying toolmakers that make developers more productive, which is why we are so eager to announce our investment in ChiselStrike today.
The pain of building a backend
Two of the most important tasks for a web developer are building a beautiful frontend for their application and architecting a scalable backend to support it. We noticed that developers have many options for simplifying frontend development with tools such as Netlify, Vercel, and Gatsby, but building the accompanying backend is not nearly as easy.
Building the right backend is a complex, time-consuming process. First, a developer needs to choose a web framework and decide how to model their domain. Then, they need to set up their database while ensuring queries are optimized and capacity scales with usage. Next, they have to figure out how to deploy the application and make sure that it has low latency, even at the edge. Finally, to support a global customer base, they must comply with privacy policies across many different geographies. Until the developer makes these decisions and builds all this out, their application can’t do anything.
What if there was a better, more modern way to automate and abstract all this complexity away?
Enter ChiselStrike
ChiselStrike has created an automated, low-code way for developers to create serverless backends from TypeScript. The product abstracts away backend infrastructure and databases, allowing developers to easily deploy at the edge and write compliance policies as code. The key benefits of the product include:
- lower latency due to the edge deployment
- easier scale-up of resources via the serverless backend
- a simpler way to declaratively specify compliance policies
Developers can use the product today via the open source offering or the hosted version (in public beta). Any developer can get started with ChiselStrike in three easy steps:
- Provide the TypeScript types and endpoints and ChiselStrike automatically generates the best end-to-end serverless backend
- Provide the compliance policies (such as PII) and specification for geographic distribution
- Deploy the backend and users will be serviced at the edge without the developer having to worry about scaling, modeling, or technical limitations
If you’re thinking this solution seems too good to be true, you’re in good company! We are excited to be among a number of investors who also recognize the value of what ChiselStrike offers. We are joined in our investment by Mango Capital, Blumberg Capital, First Star Ventures, Essence VC, Netlify’s Jamstack Innovation Fund, and amazing angels including the founders of Vercel, Netlify, PagerDuty, GitHub, Packet, Influxdata, and Redpanda.
We are privileged to have the opportunity to work with the founding team of ChiselStrike, Glauber Costa, Dejan Mircevski, and Pekka Enberg. All three are well versed in building large, scalable databases, operating systems, and compilers, having done it throughout their careers. In fact, they previously worked together at ScyllaDB. We’re thrilled to join ChiselStrike on their journey to simplify the web developer experience and welcome them to the Norwest family.
