Reflections on staying the distance and Coder's customer-led $90M Series C

We launched Uncork's new brand yesterday and two of the core tenets are investing before it's obvious and sticking around for the long-term. I like to think we do that with every portfolio company but Coder's journey exemplifies that even more than most.

In 2018, we led their Seed round alongside Alex Bard at Redpoint. The bet was on three teenage founders, Kyle Carberry, Ammar Bandukwala, and John Andrew Entwistle, who had a particular point of view on how software would be built. A year later Redpoint led their Series A. Glenn Solomon from Notable Capital led the Series B in 2020. The amazing Rob Whiteley joined the squad as CEO in 2023 and soon afterwards Russell Moore and Georgian led the B-1.

Their product is core infrastructure, and as Rob says in his announcement blog, infra rarely grows at the >10x pace we sometimes see in PLG. But that's not necessarily a bad thing - infrastructure is sticky and durable, and although sales cycles can be long, the payoffs are huge. Like in the order of a million dollars per year for a single customer who are deploying you wall-to-wall to provide secure workspaces for all of their human software engineers.

The company was landing incredible logos (think Netflix, Palantir, Canva, RobinHood, Morgan Stanley, Goldman, KKR) and consistently doubling ARR year over year. A very good business, even if not the fastest growing in our portfolio.

Then everything changed. It wasn't just humans writing software. Indeed, in the most progressive organizations, AI agents began committing significantly more code than their human-supervisors. It turns out that AI agents need exactly the same security and governance, policies and control as humans. Indeed, the need is even more acute. You only have to look at the news to see the latest incident where AI did something blindingly dangerous and shared a codebase or turned off a production database. Coder fixes this.

Fast forward to today. Coder is becoming the standard for enterprise AI coding governance and their customers are growing spend faster than ever. Net dollar retention is 184% for the last twelve months and accelerating. Q1 bookings are 4x versus this time last year. Probably the most exciting software company in the world is only allowing their AI to build their AI using Coder. It's happening.

I'm delighted to announce Coder's Series $90M C led by KKR with major participation from Qube Research & Technologies (QRT) and Uncork. This is deeply notable because KKR and QRT are not just financial investors, they're also very large Coder customers. "We liked the technology so much we bought part of the company" as it were.

Also notable is the fact that Uncork are the only VC to have invested in every single round. Long before it was obvious, through the messy middle, and after it began to inflect. This is what we do and I couldn't be prouder to be an ongoing part of their eight year overnight success story. Onwards! 🚀