Cortex is a comprehensive platform designed to provide engineering teams with complete visibility and control over their microservices ecosystem. Its key features include the Cortex Service Catalog, which integrates seamlessly with popular engineering tools, enabling teams to organize critical information and understand service dependencies.
Cortex Scorecards and Initiatives allow teams to establish standards and define paths for improvement, assessing production readiness and development maturity. Cortex Scaffolder and Actions enable teams to quickly build and deploy new services according to best practices. By offering a unified interface for visualizing ownership and driving lasting organizational change, Cortex empowers teams to make informed decisions and optimize their operations.
The San Francisco-based company is not a leading internal developer portal (IDP), has recently announced a successful Series B funding round, raising $35 million. The funding was led by IVP, with participation from Craft Ventures and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, and YCombinator. Cack Wilhelm, General Partner at IVP, will join the Cortex board of directors. The latest investment will be utilized by Cortex to enhance integrations and automation, aiming to establish the most connected and intuitive IDP in the world.
Cortex has emerged as a critical solution for enterprises that prioritize developer productivity in the face of the current macro environment. While artificial intelligence has accelerated developer work, the time spent on issue remediation can potentially negate any efficiency gains. Cortex addresses this challenge by equipping developers with the necessary tools to work quickly and effectively. The company’s growth and support for organizations on their path to engineering excellence have made it indispensable in the industry.
The funding round showcases Cortex’s commitment to incentivizing adoption and has generated significant momentum among engineering teams already familiar with commercial or open source IDPs. Cortex’s co-founder and CTO, Ganesh Datta, emphasized the importance of IDPs, as engineering teams increasingly recognize their value and strive to implement them across their entire organizations.
Cortex’s platform offers a guided and flexible experience, bridging the gaps left by open source alternatives and integrating adjacent technologies such as application performance monitoring (APM), continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), and metric monitors. By enabling teams to identify areas for improvement and driving a culture of ownership, reliability, and continuous enhancement, Cortex plays a pivotal role in enhancing the overall quality of services.
Scott Dunbar, SVP Engineering Enablement at Sportradar, shared their experience with Cortex, explaining how the platform exceeded their initial expectations. Initially seeking to align and document their services, they quickly realized the platform’s broader potential. Sportradar embarked on org-wide initiatives to establish a standardized development process and ensure optimal service quality. Cortex facilitated these initiatives by enabling them to define quality standards, guide developers toward improvement, and support new projects. As a result, developer productivity increased, and various teams across reliability, security, platform, and leadership gained better visibility.
Anish Dhar, co-founder and CEO of Cortex, highlighted the motivation behind the company’s inception. Drawing from their own experiences as engineers and the challenges they faced in maintaining quality services, the Cortex team built a platform that simplifies these complexities. Their aim was to demonstrate that abstracting away the most challenging aspects of service maintenance would predictably and measurably enhance developer productivity in any organization. With the support and guidance of their customers, Cortex has evolved from offering the best service maturity platform to becoming a market leader in IDPs. The company is grateful for the opportunity to partner with leading enterprises and is excited to unveil future innovations.
As a YCombinator company, Cortex boasts an impressive roster of backers, including Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, and IVP. Their latest funding round will undoubtedly fuel the company’s continued growth and further establish their position.
