Cortex, a prominent internal developer portal (IDP) provider, has secured $35 million in Series B funding led by IVP, with participation from Craft Ventures and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, and YCombinator. As part of the funding, Cack Wilhelm from IVP will join the Cortex board of directors. The new investment round will enable Cortex to enhance integrations and automation, aiming to create the most connected and intuitive IDP in the world.
This funding announcement comes at the end of a highly successful year for Cortex, marked by a 400% year-over-year revenue growth and new deployments in enterprise companies such as TripAdvisor, Docker, Grammarly, Unity, and SoFi. These organizations rely on Cortex to efficiently gather, contextualize, and standardize development best practices. The increased demand for Cortex is driven by the industry’s shift toward service-oriented architectures that present scalability challenges.
“Developer productivity is a top priority for engineering initiatives in today’s landscape. While AI has accelerated developer work, the time spent on issue resolution risks offsetting efficiency gains,” said Cack Wilhelm. “Cortex has become indispensable to many enterprises by addressing the quality and velocity challenge, equipping developers with the necessary tools to work effectively and quickly. We’re partnering with Cortex at this crucial stage to help them accelerate their growth and support organizations on their journey to engineering excellence.”
Cortex’s unique approach to driving adoption has generated significant momentum among audiences already familiar with alternative commercial or open source IDPs. “Engineering teams recognize the importance of IDPs and are committed to deploying and promoting their adoption across their entire organizations,” said Ganesh Datta, Cortex co-founder and CTO. “Our platform offers a guided and flexible experience, filling the gaps left by open-source alternatives and a mix of related technologies like APMs, CI/CD, and metric monitors. Cortex helps teams identify areas for improvement and incentivizes progress to foster a culture of ownership, reliability, and continuous enhancement.”
Scott Dunbar, SVP Engineering Enablement at Sportradar, shared their positive experience with Cortex: “We initially chose Cortex to enhance alignment and documentation of our services but soon realized its full potential. We now have organization-wide initiatives to establish a ‘golden path’ for developers and ensure healthy ‘golden metrics’ for our services. Cortex enables both objectives in ways that were previously not possible, allowing us to define standards for service quality, guide developers toward improvement, and kickstart new projects. These initiatives directly impact developer productivity and provide visibility to multiple teams across reliability, security, platform, and leadership.”
Anish Dhar, co-founder and CEO of Cortex, highlighted the company’s motivation for building the platform: “As experienced engineers with firsthand knowledge of the challenges posed by microservices, we created Cortex to help other developers abstract the most difficult aspects of maintaining high-quality services. We aimed to demonstrate that doing so would consistently and measurably accelerate developer productivity in every organization. With the support and guidance of our customers, we have gone beyond building the best service maturity platform and emerged as a leader in the IDP market. We are grateful for our partnerships with leading enterprises and humbled by the rapid momentum our platform has gained. We look forward to showcasing what’s next for the industry.”
