“Blazingly fast” Raycast raises $15 million in Accel and Coatue-led round

London’s self-described, “blazingly fast, totally extendable launcher,” Raycast has lit up the Series A round with $15 million. The service provides a fast and intuitive interface aimed at developers who want to automate a number of tedious processes. The fledgling company intends to use the funding to continue growth, namely via community development.

Founded in 2020 by former Facebook software engineers Thomas Paul Mann (CEO) and Petr Nikolaev (CTO), the duo sought to solve a problem they faced daily: busywork that’s driven by notifications instead of motivations. First step? Centralise the swath of Information that is normally scattered across a variety of apps, and browser tabs that end up fighting for attention. And what’s more, corral them all into an interface that developers feel most comfortable with: enter the command line.

With all the noise, Mann and Nikolaev realised that developers’ creative energies, you know, those things that they’re usually hired for, are spent on alt/tabbing, context-switching, and ending a workday with sense of lack-of-accomplishment. Can you say, “tough day at the office?”

Since releasing Raycast to the wild, within 12 months, the active daily user base skyrocketed from 130 in October 2020 to over 11,000 to date, with more than 20 million actions performed on the platform in that time. Needless to say, a solution has been found and embraced by many.

But it would seem that Raycast isn’t quite done putting smiles on the faces of developers, as with the launch of its Extensions API and Store, developers now have the ability to build custom extensions of their own, sometimes in less than half an hour, and share them with their team and/or community to further optimise and automate common tasks. If the proof is in the pudding, then hand me the spoon, as within a month Raycast’s community built over 100 extensions, connecting to services like Figma, GitHub, Chrome, Notion, YouTube, Twitter and many more.

“We’ve been blown away by the response from our community since launching in public beta,” commented Mann. “It’s always been our goal to create a platform and developer community based around productivity; and with today’s funding and the public launch of our API and Store, we believe we’re well on our way to achieving that. Our community jumped on the API when it was in public beta, and we can’t wait to see what custom extensions they will build in the months to come.”

Raycast’s $15 million Series A round was led by Accel and Coatue, with angel investors including Johnny Boufarhat, CEO and founder of Hopin; Jeff Weinstein, Product at Stripe; Jason Warner, former CTO of GitHub and Ott Kaukver, CTO of Checkout.com and ex-CTO of Twilio, among others.

"Since leading Raycast’s seed investment, we’ve been impressed with the growth and traction Raycast has seen in the developer community," added Accel's Andrei Brasoveanu. “This backs up our initial belief that Raycast has the potential to become an indispensable tool for developers, and we’re excited to see the team go even further with the launch of the API and Store and expansion to teams. We’re delighted to continue supporting Thomas and Petr on their ambitious journey.”