It’s the end of July. Most of you are probably on a beach somewhere, and honestly, good for you. I’m in Europe for the summer, and something about this season always makes me reflective. Maybe it’s because I turned 40 this year. Maybe it’s because on March 14, 2017, we incorporated Waydev, and nine years is the kind of number that stops you.
So I’ve been sitting with our story. The Developer Productivity Insight market, as Gartner named it. Our market. And when I look back, I see a few highlights, but believe me, the highlights don’t even come close to telling you what this journey really was.
Let me try anyway.
Two years. Let that sink in. Two years of building, pitching, getting ignored, while GitPrime, the giant in our space, was closing deals everywhere. Then in 2019, GitPrime sold to Pluralsight for $170 million, and I remember exactly how that felt. Part of me was celebrating, because it meant the market we bet everything on was real. Part of me was thinking: they just sold for $170 million and we’re still fighting for our first contracts.
But we got them. Our first paying customers. I still remember those names. You never forget the people who believed in you when nobody else did.
You want to know what a founder’s worst nightmare feels like? It feels like that morning.
It took us almost a year to recover. A year of rebuilding trust, rebuilding infrastructure, rebuilding ourselves. There were nights I honestly did not know if we would make it. And I want to be transparent about this, because too many founders only show you the wins. The breach is public, our disclosure is public, and I’m not hiding from it. It made us who we are.
Because here’s the twist. That same brutal year, Y Combinator accepted us into the W21 batch. From the hardest moment of my life to the most validating one, in the same twelve months. And around that time we crossed $1 million in ARR. When that number hit, I just sat there. After everything, we were still standing. More than standing.
A few years later, we were negotiating seven-figure deals with Fortune 50 companies. The kid from Bucharest who took two years to find his first customer.
Now let me tell you the part that makes me proudest, and maybe a little crazy.
Except for Y Combinator, we never took a dollar of institutional capital. Zero. Meanwhile, look at our market. Jellyfish raised $114.5 million. LinearB raised over $80 million. Code Climate took a $50 million Series C. Faros AI raised $20 million. GitPrime was worth $170 million to Pluralsight. DX took money from ICONIQ, the fund behind Snowflake and Datadog, and then got acquired by Atlassian. Add it all up and more than half a billion dollars has been poured into our category.
And we are still here. Independent. Profitable on our own terms. Built on revenue, discipline, and pure stubbornness.
I’ll say it without hesitation, and I know how it sounds: we have the best product in this market. Not because we outspent anyone. We could not outspend anyone. But when you can’t burn investor money on promises, you’re forced to build only what customers actually pay for. Every single feature in Waydev exists because a real engineering leader needed it. That’s the whole secret.
And watch what’s happening around us. GitPrime, absorbed. DX, absorbed. Consolidation everywhere. Nine years in, we’re the ones still standing on our own two feet.
The market changed. Not slowly. Violently.
For years, our mission has been the same: helping companies move from feeling-driven to data-driven. That mission has not moved one inch. But the questions changed completely. Engineering leaders used to ask me about velocity and cycle time. Now they grab my arm at conferences and ask: how much of the AI code we’re generating actually reaches production? What is my AI cost per PR when an agent writes it? Am I getting ROI or just a token bill?
The old Waydev could not answer that. Honestly, nothing built before this era could.
So last year we made the scariest decision since founding the company. We rebuilt Waydev from zero as an AI-native platform, with our own agent at the heart of it. Not a chatbot glued on top of old dashboards. An agent that knows your engineering organization and tells you how much AI-generated code ships to production, breaks down AI cost per PR and per team, catches risks before you find them in some report, and answers your questions the way a trusted VP of Engineering would.
All on top of everything our customers already rely on. We didn’t throw away nine years of engineering intelligence. We gave it a brain.
And if you want proof this community journey is real, look at our Product Hunt history. Eleven launches. Seven Launch of the Day awards. It started with the original Waydev in August 2018, finishing 5th of the day. One year later, Waydev 2.0 hit number 1. Waydev 3.0 took 3rd in 2020, right in the middle of our recovery from the breach, which tells you everything about that team. Then Waydev AI landed 4th in October 2025, The New Waydev took 3rd this April, and just two weeks later Waydev Agent took 4th. Three award-winning launches in seven months. Every single launch, same butterflies, same refreshing the page every two minutes. Some things never change, and I hope they never do.
Here’s the thing that gives me chills. Gartner just released its Magic Quadrant for our market. Nine years ago this category barely had a name. Today it’s a boardroom conversation.
And we are ready. Ready to help enterprises finally make the switch to being truly data-driven. Track developer sentiment. Validate it with the SPACE and DORA frameworks. Then amplify everything through AI transformation.
Nine years ago I could not get a single company to pay for this vision. Today, Fortune 500 companies run on it, and the biggest analyst firm in the world put a quadrant around our market.
The first nine years were about surviving long enough to matter. The next nine are about defining what this market becomes.
Trust me. We are just getting started.
Alex Circei is the CEO and Co-Founder of Waydev, the AI-native engineering intelligence platform.
Ready to unlock your SDLC productivity?
