This week’s updates show just how quickly developer tools (devtools) are evolving. AI agents are stepping into real workflows, from fixing broken tests and handling security reviews to generating production-ready UI code. There’s a clear focus on giving developers more control inside their existing tools, without adding noise. We’re also seeing thoughtful infrastructure built for specific regions and use cases, like Salus Cloud’s secure DevOps platform for African startups and Firebender’s deep Android Studio integration (who quite deservedly earned our DevTools of the Week spot)!
🏆 Funding Wins
SafetyKit Banks $27M to Let AI Handle the Dirty Work
SafetyKit has secured $27M to help platforms like Upwork, Patreon, and Substack replace human moderators with reliable, production-ready AI agents. The agents outperform typical outsourced teams by spotting fraud, scams, and illegal content with 95% accuracy. Ribbit and First Round Capital led the round, joined by Y Combinator, Claire Hughes Johnson, James Dyett, and Jon Zieger. Co-founders David Graunke and Steven Guichard launched SafetyKit after building enterprise risk platforms at Stripe and Cisco.
🛅 Explore how their AI works in the full announcement here.
Linear Hits Unicorn Status with $82M Raise
Linear just raised an $82M Series C led by Accel, reaching a $1.25B valuation and cementing its place as the go-to tool for modern product teams. Over 15,000 companies including OpenAI, CashApp, and Boom use Linear to manage the entire product workflow, and now AI agents are becoming part of the team too. CEO and co-founder Karri Saarinensays the mission remains the same: “Same goals, just with more fuel.”
🚀 Congrats to the Linear team; check out the update here.
Salus Cloud Lands $3.7M to Bring Secure DevOps to Africa
Cape Town-based Salus Cloud has raised $3.7M to help African and Middle Eastern startups deploy software securely without building CI/CD pipelines from scratch. Their AI-native platform handles automation, security, and compliance out of the box, tailored for lean engineering teams. The round was co-led by Atlantica Ventures and P1 Ventures, with backing from LoftyInc, Zedcrest, Everywhere Ventures and Tim Chen. Founded in 2024 by Andrew Mori, Jaco Nel, and Deen Hans, Salus is already seeing adoption in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.
“We built Salus so a fintech can focus on loans, an e-commerce company on logistics not on securing Kubernetes or building core banking from scratch,”– Andrew Mori
⛅ Find out how they’re scaling across the continent on salus.cloud.
🚀 3, 2, 1… Launches
Mistral AI Makes a Move With Magistral
Last week, French AI Lab, Mistral AI unveiled Magistral, its newest 22B parameter reasoning model, built from scratch and released under an open licence. Two variants are available: Magistral Small (open source) and Magistral Medium (enterprise). The models are fine-tuned for multilingual, multi-step logic and are optimised for traceability and interpretability across regulated domains. According to the team:
“Magistral is designed to excel in domain-specific, transparent, and multilingual reasoning.”
Founded in 2023 by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothee Lacroix, Mistral continues to push for accessible, high-performance AI through open science.
🧪 Explore Magistral in this full launch post.
ArmorCode Launches AI Code Insights to Illuminate Risk in Your Repos
ArmorCode Inc. has released AI Code Insights, an AI-powered assistant that lives inside your PRs and code repos to uncover hidden assets, trace security risks, and prioritise remediation. It automatically maps developers to vulnerabilities, surfaces IaC and container definitions, and flags material code changes.
Founder and CEO Nikhil Gupta explained the motivation:
“This GitHub MCP incident perfectly illustrates why we built ArmorCode AI Code Insights… We’re not just building another security tool. We’re building the foundation that lets security keep pace with innovation.”
The launch strengthens ArmorCode’s ASPM platform, now trusted by 175,000+ developers and security professionals.
🔍 Learn more and book a demo here.
Databricks Builds the Stack for AI-Powered Apps with Lakebase, Agent Bricks, and Lakeflow Designer
At the Data + AI Summit last week, Databricks has launched three new tools to help enterprises build AI-powered applications faster. Lakebase is a fully managed Postgres database optimised for low-latency AI workloads and integrated with the lakehouse. Lakeflow Designer introduces a no-code interface and AI assistant for creating production data pipelines. Agent Bricks simplifies the process of creating agents by letting developers describe a task and connect relevant data. Together, these tools expand the company’s Data Intelligence Platform into a more complete stack for intelligent app development.
🧱 Read the full announcement here.
Trustwise Takes the Manual Out of Security Reviews with Harmony AI
@Trustwise has debuted Harmony AI, an AI-native assistant that helps teams complete vendor security questionnaires and compliance reviews without the usual back-and-forth. Harmony connects to your existing security stack, understands your policies and posture, and drafts accurate, audit-ready responses with cited sources. It integrates with tools like Vanta, Drata, and OneTrust, and aims to save security and sales teams hours per review. The product is now available with a waitlist for early access. Founder and CEO, Manoj Saxena proudly announced:
Huge kudos to our team at Trustwise and the partners who helped shape this new system in real-world, high-stakes environments. This is how we scale AI safely, without slowing down innovation.
🔐 Learn more about Harmony AI here.
LangChain Introduces Davia to Turn Python Into Full Web Apps
Davia is the newest open-source framework from the LangChainteam, designed to turn Python scripts into production-ready web apps in minutes. Define your logic in Python, and Davia handles the UI, state, and real-time updates automatically. It works with any Python application, including LangGraph agents, and integrates seamlessly with FastAPI. With a built-in dev dashboard, Tailwind-styled components, and visual design tools, Davia removes the need for frontend scaffolding.
⚡ Start building at davia.ai or explore the GitHub repo.
Lumenary’s Solar Turns One-Person Teams Into Product Powerhouses
Solar from Lumenary (YC S24) is a full-stack AI platform where solo builders can create production-grade apps in minutes. Combining Figma’s flexibility with Cursor’s codegen power, Solar lets developers architect entire systems on a multiplayer canvas, from backend logic and database schemas to frontend UIs and live data flows. It’s already been used to build automated trading systems, multiplayer game engines, and internal tools that would’ve been standalone startups a year ago.
💡 Huge congrats to founders John McCambridge, Vivek Hazari, Dan D., and Ziray Hao on the launch. Try it free at try.solar and watch the launch video here.
Sieve Shares the Dubbing Rubric to Raise the Standard for AI Video Translation
Sieve has just launched the Dubbing Rubric, a detailed framework for evaluating AI dubbing systems, with founder Mokshith Voodarlaannouncing the release last Thursday.
Designed to tackle the complexity of multilingual voice translation, the rubric focuses on seven key categories including linguistic accuracy, voice fidelity, naturalness, and multi-speaker handling. Alongside the rubric, Sieve published the results of a large-scale human evaluation across leading providers, showing Sieve topping five of seven categories including clarity, grammar, and timing. This is a major step toward transparent benchmarking and improved standards for AI dubbing.
🎯 Explore the methodology and results in their interactive site or find the launch post here.
StarSling Launches Agentic Dev Portal to Automate the Annoying Bits
StarSling (YC X25) is rethinking the internal developer portal by adding AI agents that fix the stuff you don’t want to. From patching flaky CI tests to resolving incidents and opening PRs with bug fixes, their agentic homepage connects to tools like GitHub, Linear, and Sentry and turns noisy alerts into one-click Autofix actions.
Co-founders Yonas Beshawred and Daniel Worku know this space inside out. Daniel built Netflix’s internal portal for 3,000 engineers. Yonas created StackShare, which reached over 1.5M developers. Together, they’re building a command center that unifies the tools devs use every day and orchestrates powerful AI workflows across them.
🛸 Join the waitlist or explore more at starsling.dev
🔦 DevTool of the Week: Firebender
Firebender was launched in 2023 by Aman Gottumukkala and Kevin T. after an ambitious attempt to build Firebender OS, an AI-powered fork of Android. Realising the bigger opportunity was in solving the day-to-day frustrations of Android engineers, they pivoted to something more focused: a fast, accurate, and privacy-first AI assistant for Android Studio.
Available as a one-click install from the IntelliJ plugin marketplace, Firebender gives developers a chat window right inside their IDE that understands the codebase, emulator, profiler, and logs. It stays current with Android’s fast-moving SDKs and libraries, which generalist AI tools like Gemini and Copilot often fail to keep up with. Engineers from companies like GoodRx and Airbnb have openly criticised those tools for their lack of Android support. Firebender is the response.
Last week, they introduced Composer, a new agent that turns Figma designs into Jetpack Compose code inside Android Studio. It analyses previews, inspects layouts, and adjusts output in real time to get closer to pixel-perfect accuracy. The team has even open-sourced samples and chat logs so developers can judge the output for themselves.
Built by a team of just three, Firebender is taking on some of the toughest challenges in Android development and AI.
🔥Try Composer and explore the future of Android coding here.
Thanks for reading. Lots to be excited about this week, especially tools built by small teams who clearly understand the problems they’re solving. If you spot a launch or funding round that deserves a mention, send it our way.
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