Today marks a pivotal moment for Tempest. With $3.2M in seed funding led by Abstract Ventures, Box Group, and Background Capital, and backed by industry luminaries like Max Mullen (Instacart co-founder), Jason Chan (former VP of InfoSec at Netflix), and Mike Abbott (former VP of Engineering at Apple), we are officially launching into General Availability.
But this is more than just a product launch. It’s the next chapter in our journey to revolutionize how companies build and deploy developer platforms—a mission born from years of firsthand experience tackling the inefficiencies and frustrations faced by engineering teams worldwide.
The Problem We Couldn’t Ignore
After Apple acquired our previous company Fleetsmith in 2020, my co-founders (Lukasz Jagiello and Eric Skram) and I observed a pattern that was impossible to overlook. Companies were hiring incredibly talented engineers, only to bog them down with infrastructure tasks instead of letting them focus on writing and improving code.
We knew that this wasn’t just inefficient—it was a risk to the business. When talented engineers spend days wrestling with CI/CD pipelines instead of delivering customer-facing value, companies are losing more than just time. They’re losing revenue, market opportunities, and their competitive edge. At Tempest, we believe that poor developer experience isn’t just a developer problem, it’s a whole business problem that can be existential when left uncheck.
Why the Status Quo Isn’t Enough
For most engineering teams, the options are grim:
Cobble together fragmented tools with endless integrations and duct tape.
Build everything from scratch, which can take years and cost millions.
Tools like Spotify’s Backstage—designed to address these challenges—come with significant setup time and ongoing maintenance that many teams simply can’t afford.
But the data is clear: companies with high-quality developer experience grow their revenue four to five times faster than their peers. Yet most organizations that attempt to build these platforms in-house face months of development, enormous complexity, and lackluster adoption.
This is Tempest
Tempest offers a faster, smarter way to build your developer platform. We combine total visibility over your entire stack with built-in developer self-serve automation. We're both a developer portal and platform—insight and action—and we empower engineering teams to ship faster while maintaining complete control over their infrastructure. In today's competitive landscape, delivering an exceptional developer experience isn't just nice to have—it's essential for attracting and retaining top engineering talent. Our unified platform eliminates bottlenecks by giving developers the tools they need to provision resources, troubleshoot issues, and optimize performance, all without getting stuck waiting for approvals or requests.
Here’s how Tempest transforms your workflow:
Turn Insights Into Action with a Built In Developer Portal
Service Catalog: Centralize services and resources for full cloud visibility and efficient management.
Software Ownership: Assign and keep up-to-date clear ownership for your services, reducing downtime and enabling faster issue resolution.
Policies (coming soon!): Define and enforce engineering best practices with customizable policies to ensure compliance and consistency across all resources.
Empower Developers with Platform Automations
Developer Self-Serve: Developers can access pre-configured infrastructure and environments instantly, removing bottlenecks and increasing velocity.
Automated Deployments: Consistent, secure, and automated provisioning ensures teams focus on code, not operations.
Out-of-the-Box Apps and Developer SDK: Extend Tempest’s functionality to your internal tools and existing systems seamlessly.
From Guardrails to Autobahns: Turn your platform guardrails into high-performance engineering highways.
“In my experience, the most effective organisations provide developers with clear, secure pathways—what we now call 'paved roads' and something we introduced early on in my career at Netflix. Tempest makes it easy to implement those pathways, removing the friction that slows down teams and putting security and compliance on autopilot.”
Jason Chan, Netflix, Vice President of InfoSec
Our Vision: A World Where Engineers Focus on Innovation
Tempest isn’t just about solving today’s inefficiencies—it’s about creating a foundation for tomorrow’s innovation.
We envision a future where engineering teams can:
Focus on building features their customers love, not waiting for infrastructure.
Empower developers to self-serve their needs securely and efficiently.
Scale confidently, knowing their platform grows with them.
We’ve designed Tempest to make that vision a reality. By providing teams with clear, automated pathways to deploy securely and efficiently, we’re giving developers the tools they need to deliver innovation at the speed of business.
The developer platform space has evolved, but teams are still cobbling together internal solutions and are likely compromising with existing vendor solutions as a stop gap solution. Tempest has cracked this challenge by delivering a unified platform that combines sound security controls with the flexibility modern development teams demand to move quickly and efficiently.
Jake King, Elastic, Founder of Cmd
Looking Ahead
Tempest is now available to teams of all sizes, with transparent pricing—including a free tier for teams up to 10 seats. We’re committed to making enterprise-grade developer platforms accessible to everyone. We’d love to show you a live demo of the product, but you can also sign up and try all of Tempest’s features for free.
This journey wouldn’t be possible without the incredible support of our investors, advisors, and most importantly, the engineering teams who inspire us every day.
We can’t wait to see what you’ll build with Tempest. Together, let’s unlock the full potential of your engineering team and shape the future of software delivery.
Explore Tempest and get started today. We can’t wait to see what you build.