Netlify has raised millions for its own efforts to establish a developer-focused service that would help with Jamstack development. Today, Netlify announced the first round of investments for its Jamstack Innovation Fund.
Jamstack is an emerging development stack that combines Javascript, APIs, and Markup (the JAM in Jamstack) for web applications. Netlify is one of the few companies to have raised $105 million in a series D round of investment in November 2021, bringing the firm to a valuation of $2 billion.
Netlify's Jamstack Innovation Fund includes $100,000 in investments in ten different businesses in an effort to broaden their visibility and ultimately add more capabilities to Jamstack platforms, like Netlify.
The ten startups included in the first round of investment include the Chiselstrike data platform, Clerk authentication, Clutch, which provides Jamstack development for small enterprises, state management firm Convex, GraphQL mesh vendor Snaplet, Vue.js framework vendor Everfund, backend mobile app provider Tigris Data, and JavaScript runtime platform vendor Deno.
Deno wants to reimagine JavaScript.
Despite the fact that all of Netlify's investments are startups, some are a bit further along in their journey than others. Deno is a well-known example of a company that announced on June 21 that it had raised a $21 million round of investment.
Deno is already used by Netlify on its platform as the JavaScript runtime technology that powers its Netlify Edge Functions service, which was announced on April 19.
Everyone is pushing everything to the edge, and that's a major trend for the web, but if you look closely, Bach says there's a lot of proprietary standards out there.
Bach pointed out that Deno is an open-source technology and that it benefits from being an open-source community. Deno is making it simpler for web developers to create software with JavaScript, with the capability to embed a JavaScript runtime wherever website code and applications run.
Denos JavaScript engine supports WebAssembly, a new open standard that allows code written in any language to run on the same runtime engine. Bach said that in his opinion, it's still early days for WebAssembly, and he's interested in seeing where the technology ends.
Jamstack applications may receive further data.
One of the key themes that Netlify has invested in is the need to assist in the connecting of web applications to data.
Chiselstrike is a one-stop shop for backend application capabilities. Snaplet, which was founded in Berlin, Germany, is looking to solve a different issue by assisting Jamstack developers to easily access PostgreSQL-based databases.
Jamstack applications receive data in the form of APIs (application programming interfaces) but this is beginning to be displaced by the GraphQL API standard, which was founded in 2017 in Brooklyn.
Netlify is no stranger to the GraphQL world. Along with its funding announcement in November 2021, Netlify also announced the acquisition of OneGraph, a GraphQL vendor.
Netlify has a very strong opinion that GraphQL is an absolutely necessary API technology, according to Bach.
Giving back and paying it forward
Netlify's investments aim at assisting Jamstack developers, but it also invests in Everfund, which is a different platform.
Everfund is essentially designed to emulate Stripe, but for donations, according to Bach. Nonprofit information is something that a lot of developers actually touch.
Bach stated that the market for all types of donations during the epidemic was usually online. What has become evident to him, and to Everfund, is that there is a need for an open platform to facilitate donation processing.
Bach said that the whole industry needs a major overhaul of how they do things and to make it as easy as possible for non-profits to publish something on the web. I believe that Everfund has a great vision for that.
