Two funding rounds, two launches, and two new venture funds all landed in the devtools space this week. Codeplain and Ollama raised capital for code generation and open-weight model tooling, Unlayer and Inkbox launched new infrastructure for content generation and AI agent identity, and Chemistry Ventures and Vermilion Cliffs Ventures both announced fresh funds targeting early-stage devtools founders.
🏆 DevTools Funding Wins
Codeplain Raises $3M Seed To Turn Specs Into Code
*codeplain, based across Ljubljana, Berlin, and San Francisco, has raised a $3M ($2.6M) seed round led by GapMinder VC and Silicon Gardens. Founded by Dusan Omercevic, the company built a platform that lets developers and AI agents write structured, plain-language specifications and generate production-ready code from them. It uses what it calls the Phoenix Architecture, where teams update specifications and regenerate code automatically rather than maintaining it by hand. As AI agents write more code, keeping that output structured and version-controlled becomes a real operational problem, and Codeplain is betting specs are the fix. 🎉 Congrats to the Codeplain team on the raise, read more about it here.
Ollama Closes $65M Series B As Open-Weight Model Adoption Grows
Ollama has raised a $65M Series B led by Theory Ventures, bringing its total funding to $88M following a previous $15M Series A led by Benchmark. Founded by Jeffrey Morgan and Michael Chiang, the team behind Kitematic and Docker Desktop, Ollama lets developers download and run open-weight models locally or in the cloud with a single command. The tool has amassed 176,000 GitHub stars and nearly 17,000 forks, and reportedly serves 8.9 million developers with just 14 employees. The new funding will go toward hybrid local-cloud inference and faster support for newly released open models. 🎉 Congrats to Jeff and Michael on the round, see the full story in their blog post.
🚀 New DevTools Launched
Unlayer Debuts Elements For Writing Content Once In React
Unlayer (YC W22) has launched Elements, an open-source React content layer that lets developers and AI agents generate emails, web pages, and PDFs from a single codebase. Most teams end up running separate systems for email templates, web pages, PDFs, and visual editors, even though the underlying content is often similar. Elements ships familiar components like Email, Page, Document, and Row, each tuned to render correctly for its output type: email-safe HTML, responsive web HTML, or print-ready HTML. It also connects to Unlayer’s existing visual builder for non-technical editing. 🎉 Congrats to the Unlayer team on the launch, check out the demo and GitHub repo.
Inkbox Gives AI Agents Their Own Email, Phone, and iMessage
Inkbox (YC S26) has launched an identity and communication layer that gives AI agents their own email inbox, phone number, iMessage access, and a persistent internet address for receiving webhook traffic. Founders Ray Liao, Alex Wilcox, and Dima Vremenko built it after repeatedly stitching together Gmail, Twilio, and ngrok separately for agents that needed to handle 2FA codes or be reachable directly. Inkbox bundles that identity and context into one API, plus an encrypted credential vault for TOTP and 2FA. It ships with plugins for Hermes, OpenClaw, Claude Code, and Codex. 🐙 Great news on the launch. Learn more at inkbox.ai.
💰 New Capital Targeting DevTools
Two fresh funds landed this week aimed squarely at devtools founders.
Chemistry, the two-year-old San Francisco firm founded by Mark Goldberg, Ethan Kurzweil, and Kristina Shen (formerly of Index Ventures, Bessemer, and a16z respectively), is raising $500M for its second fund, according to an SEC filing, after launching with a $350M debut fund backing early-stage AI infrastructure and application startups including Granola, Decagon, Persona, Serval, and Nova Intelligence. The Wall Street Journal reports the new fund is already oversubscribed and expected to close soon. Read More.
Vermilion Cliffs Ventures closed a $25M Fund II this week, run solo by GP Ashley Smith, one of the few solo women GPs in venture capital, backing technical founders in AI infrastructure, security, and dev tools with checks between $500,000 and $1M across at least 25 planned companies. Its debut $13M fund backed 35 companies, including Keycard and CopilotKit. Smith, previously in marketing at Twilio, Facebook, GitHub, and GitLab, says she focuses on helping technical founders with go-to-market strategy, an area most learn “the expensive way.” Find out more.
Got launch news or funding to share? Send it to Natalie Harper.
Want more details on the opportunities here or want to register your resume with us, reach out to Becca Combe MIRP CertRP and Louise Ogilvy directly.
