Last week, we hit a major company milestone - and you can read all about it in TechCrunch! Arcade secured $12 million in funding from Laude Ventures.
For those who haven't heard the full story, our co-founders Alex Salazar (former Okta exec) and Sam Partee (former Redis engineer) initially set out to build something quite different than what Arcade has become. This investment marks the first publicly announced funding from Laude, the new fund launched by Perplexity co-founder Andy Konwinski.
I sat down with Alex to reflect on our journey so far, our impressive roster of investors, and what this funding means for our roadmap.
What lit the fire to start Arcade.dev?
We started Arcade to solve a really different problem than what we're focused on today. It was originally a company to build an agent that would help diagnose problems on websites and mobile apps. The idea was when you got an alert that something was wrong, our agent would check all these other systems—servers, storage, Datadog, the code base.
But it was incredibly difficult to build the technology. The design patterns, the products—none of it was ready for that kind of agent. So we had to build something entirely new. In getting this agent to work, we created a new tooling layer for AI, a new way for a large language model to connect securely to various services.
When we started showing people this working agent for site reliability, they were floored. They'd never seen an agent do something like that. But the people who knew AI really well were the most impressed—not because we'd solved some site reliability problem, but because they were seeing unprecedented levels of accuracy, consistency, speed, and service integration from an agent.
They couldn't believe we'd done it. They thought it was a magic trick or a fake demo. That's when we realized we'd built something much more important. We'd created something that didn't just unblock our agent—it could unblock anyone trying to build an agent that does more than just information retrieval.
Now we get to help any company building an agent deliver their own black magic, and in doing so, change the art of the possible.
This investor lineup—how’d you pull that off?
We've been able to assemble some of the very best people in venture capital and AI.
Pete Sonsini from Laude Ventures was an early investor in Databricks, Perplexity, Anyscale, Instabase, and many other important infrastructure companies. Pete and I worked together in my last company where he was my lead investor. I love Pete—he's one of my favorite people in venture.
We're working with Mike Volpi from Hanabi Capital. This is my first time working with Mike, but he's legendary. He was an early investor in Cohere, Scale AI, and numerous other companies. He recently started Hanabi Capital and has been a fountain of advice, information, and connections. He's fantastic and incredibly responsive.
Chip Hazard from Flybridge Ventures is also with us. He was one of my rocks in my last company and was an early investor in MongoDB and Firebase. Chip truly gets developer products and has one of the best strategic minds I've encountered in VC.
We have the entire team at Neotribe, led by Kittu Kolluri. I used to work with them, and they're incredible people who taught me everything I know about focusing on breakthrough technology, which we've applied here in how we've built Arcade.
And then there's Andy Rachleff, a longtime mentor and professor of mine at Stanford. Andy makes us all look bad. He's the founder of Benchmark Capital, started Wealthfront, coined the term "product-market fit," and then invested early in DoorDash and Databricks. He's been incredibly helpful as I think through our early strategy and how we're building this business.
$12M in the bank. What’s the battle plan?
People often ask me what we're going to do with the money. I always jokingly respond, "Well, we're going to spend it."
But seriously, we've already built a breakthrough product. Until now, no one could do what we've made possible. Even in this moment, no one can do what we've made possible. Looking forward, the most important thing we're going to do with the capital is continue to hire the very best people. If you look at the team we've assembled, it's an incredible, world-class group.
We're going to extend that team lead as far as we can, both in engineering and go-to-market. On the product and engineering side, we'll continue to push the product to unlock more of what developers can build with agents—more capabilities, more integrations. We're going to smooth out the developer experience so the product just sings and everyone has a great experience using it.
We're also going to make sure everyone knows we're solving this problem. That's where our go-to-market comes in—we'll invest in marketing and our sales team. Altogether, we're setting ourselves up to create this market category and be the leader of it.
We’re hiring at Arcade.dev. If you want to build for the future of AI, check out our open roles.