Avolta

I focus on M&A and fundraising operations for the Enterprise Technology sector, particularly on developer tools, infrastructure, security, data and open-source companies.

Managing Director

The Unicorn CTO

Supporting CTOs and engineering leaders, from series A to growth development, helping them build and scale high-performance teams. Some of my clients included: Aircall, MWM, Alma, Yubo, Outscale, Traders Club Brazil, Nubank, Vauban, Zenchef, Leboncoin, Inato and others.

CTO Whisperer

Fairly Made®

Advisor

Yubo

Stych

Orchestrated a comprehensive turnaround of the product engineering department, enhancing operational efficiency and fostering high performance across a team of 30+ talented individuals.

Interim Chief Product Engineering Officer

Euronext

Engineering Management Coach

Aircall

Scalingo

Advisor to the CTO

EPITA: Ecole d'Ingénieurs en Informatique

☑ Created and managed the Tech Entrepreneurship Masters program: curriculum design, recruiting and management of Professors and student coaching.
☑ Created and taught courses to last year's CS engineering students: Sales and Marketing for Engineers, Predicting the Future of Technologies, How to Start a Startup and Engineering Management 101.

Adjunct Professor, Program Director

Engaging with developers has been the common thread in my career.




I was trained as a developer, managed developers, educated developers, and helped developers start companies 🚀

Today, I advise CEOs of developer-first companies on M&A and growth fundraising operations.

I’m also the founder of The Unicorn CTO, a global community for ambitious CTOs and technology leaders.

Follow me here for daily content on developer-first companies and investors, as well as how to better engage with developers 🧑‍💻

And for weekly insights into the developer-centric world, visit www.unicorn-cto.com.

🧑‍💻 💵 🚀 European Developer-First Startups Funding Rounds - Q1 2024


Since joining Avolta, I’ve monitored all fundraising events from European developer-first startups.
Developer-First companies prioritise developers' needs and experiences in creating and marketing their products.

In Q1 2024, I’ve counted 27 fundraising events for $345,8M raised by developer-first startups in Europe.

Key Takeaways

🇫🇷 Paris Dominates
Emerging as the hub for tech innovation, Paris led the charge with nine firms securing $164M, outpacing London's robust performance with five companies.

🤖 AI Ascends
AI ventures topped funding charts with ten companies.
Web3 also made significant strides, seeing six companies funded, closely followed by the Cloud and Cybersecurity sectors, each with four companies.

🌱 Early Stage Focus
The investment landscape was predominantly Seed / Series A, hitting a median funding mark of $9.5M.

🏦 Leading Investors
Motier Ventures stood out, especially in French rounds, followed by Index Ventures and Kima Ventures, each making four investments.

👤 Angel Insights
Hugging Face's Clem Delangue 🤗 was the most proactive business angel, backing four ventures.

⭐️ Open-Source Influence
Nearly half the startups champion open-source solutions, with an average of 8K GitHub stars.

Congratulations to Zama, who tops the list with their $73M series A, and all the other companies who successfully raised funding in Q1: Flare Network, Qdrant, Flower Labs, Adaptive ML, Kiln, Mistral AI, Filigran, Lava Network, Lago, Hive, SurrealDB, Better Stack, Superlinked, Saleor Commerce, Ori, steadybit, FLock.io, Mindflow, Privasea AB, Composable Prompts, StackOne, Vawlt, Serverpod, phospho (YC W24), Coana and orq.ai

P.S.: I've put together a Notion database with all the information. Let me know in MP if you would like to access it.

Daniel Jarjoura

Enterprise Tech M&A/Fundraising at Avolta | CTO Whisperer at The Unicorn CTO

In an engineering organisation, most velocity problems are, in reality, quality problems.


Software engineers usually qualify bugs as software malfunctions—bad code.

But bugs are usually perfectly functioning features that are not performing as the user intended.

That’s because a software organisation functions in Chinese whispers.

An executive or customer shares an idea with the product manager, who translates it into specifications to the best of their understanding.

Then software engineers translate the specifications into code, to the best of their understanding

Then, QA engineers, when they exist, verify if the features are working correctly to the best of their understanding.

And finally, users interact with the product… to the best of their understanding!

As you can see, a single distortion in the chain can create a malfunction, even if everyone has done their job well.

And the reason a project can take so much time is the back and forth between the protagonists when something goes wrong.

How do you improve such a system? 

Frequent quality checks during the process.

Like a chef who would taste a dish at each step of the cooking process instead of just looking at the plated final version.

Taste more!

A recent paper by Abi Noda, Margaret-Anne Storey, Nicole Forsgren and Dr. Michaela Greiler proposes a developer-centric approach to measuring and improving productivity.

The paper is super interesting, and I read it, so you don’t have to 😉 Here are my key takeaways:

1️⃣ Traditional measures like output or task completion time don’t enable productivity improvement.
If the output is low, it’s already too late, and we don’t know what caused a lower-than-expected output.

Instead, the paper introduces Developer Experience (DevEx) - a comprehensive approach focusing on experiences that can negatively impact a developer’s output, like interruptions, unrealistic deadlines and friction in development tools.

2️⃣ The Three Dimensions of DevEx
Feedback Loops: Speed and quality of responses in the development process.
Cognitive Load: The mental effort required for tasks and how simplification can aid efficiency.
Flow State: A state of deep focus crucial for high productivity and innovation.

3️⃣ Improvement starts with effective measurement of DevEx
You should measure perceptions (human attitudes and opinions), workflows (system and process behaviours) and KPIs (north star metrics).

Throwing several perceptive metrics in the mix can be counterintuitive, but we can learn a lot from subjective data.

After all, developers are (still) human beings 😊

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