Announcement from the DEV Community Founders ❤️
Tags: meta
Published: 2018-10-01 16:30:01

---
title: Announcement from the DEV Community Founders ❤️
published: true
description: We’re excited to share with you all that we’re taking a new step in the DEV journey.
tags: meta
cover_image: https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/jrzojwsn1o2r9tdtfw8q.png
---

We’re excited to share with you all that we’re taking a new step in the DEV journey.

We have taken on some new investors in order to help keep the lights on and grow our inclusive community of software developers. We set out to raise about $750k from open-source enthusiasts and authentic supporters of the DEV community. With an overwhelming amount of enthusiasm, we wound up raising about $950k in order to get a lot of great folks involved.

Importantly, we still have a three-person board consisting only of [myself](/ben), [Jess](/jess) and [Peter](/peter). Our founding team, therefore, still has full control over the project’s direction. We fundamentally saw this process as a way to bring in some great new partners from the industry.  Our new backers will help us build DEV into the best version of what it can be. That’s probably what everyone says, but I think it’s quite true in this case.

In order to ensure that the round was made up of good people who understood our values, we took checks as low as $5k from developers and industry professionals who qualified as accredited investors. Our lead investor is **[OSS Capital](https://oss.capital/)**, led by **Joseph Jacks**. Joseph founded Kubecon and is a very active participant in Kubernetes and other open source initiatives. As the fund's name might imply, they invest exclusively in open source, and we are actually their very first investment.

Here is the list of the rest of the investors involved. We're keeping the bios relatively brief, so we can’t do everyone full justice.

- **Amjad Masad —** Founder of repl.it, formerly founding engineer at Codeacademy and Facebook engineer. Contributed to Babel and other projects.
- **Tracy Chou —** Software engineer/entrepreneur, formerly at Pinterest, Quora and other. Founding advisor for Project Include.
- **[Charge Ventures](https://charge.vc) —** NY-based pre-seed venture fund that loves technical projects. The founding team, especially Brett Martin, has specific experience and insight related to building social platforms.
- **Ohad Eder-Pressman —** Programmer, entrepreneur and angel investor. Founded AppSharp & 3D3R Software. Early Investor in Netlify, IFTTT, and others.
- **Alex Sirota —** Programmer, entrepreneur. Founder of Loop Commerce, creator of several [web tools you’ve probably used](http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/).
- **Matt Biilmann and Christian Bach —** Founders of Netlify.
- **Brianne Kimmel —** SaaS Investor, previously GTM and Tech Integrations at Zendesk.
- **Jenny Fielding / Eclectic Fund —** Entrepreneur and Managing Director at Techstars.
- **[The Fund](https://thefund.vc) —** Early stage venture fund comprised of over 75 NYC-based founders and operators.  Co-Founded by Jenny Fielding, Matt Brimer (Co-Founder of General Assembly), Katie Hunt (Third employee @ Warby Parker, Chief Brand Officer @ Hinge), and Adam Carver (Previously Director of Business Development @ Angelist).
- **Bruce Karsh —** Co-Chairman and Chief Investment Officer at Oaktree Capital.
- **Boling Jiang —** CEO at Privacy.com.
- **John Xie —** CEO at Taskade.
- **Mike Rothman —** CEO at Fatherly.
- **Peter Wang —** CTO at TheMighty, previously CTO at Refinery29.

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**So, what’s next for DEV?** 

In short, nothing too glamorous.  Our day-to-day is going to be more of the same. The new funds will allow us to prioritize sustainable growth and value-enhancing features. We have come this far by being community-first and we want to evolve this technology platform to be as great as the people who spend time here. We have humble origins, and really just want to repay the community for the amazing encouragement along the way.

We will be able to make a few new hires ([check out our new openings](http://jobs.dev.to)), but we will be maintaining a modest team size as we continue to build a healthy open source project.  We will continue to experiment with and eventually launch new career and education-oriented initiatives.  Above all, we’re going to do our best to build this business in a sensible way.  Our long-term vision and goal are unchanged: we’ll keep striving to provide an inclusive space for the world’s software developers to evolve their craft.

Same book, new chapter. Happy coding!