Founders, investors, and support organizations active in Developer Tools.
Founded 2017 as Capital300. Series A investor focused on European tech challengers, especially DACH and CEE origins including Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, and Czechia.
Andreessen Horowitz is a global venture firm that led ElevenLabs' early growth rounds and participated again in the company's 2026 Series D. The firm is active across AI infrastructure, developer tools, enterprise software, and consumer internet.
Apify turns the web into an API by providing a platform where developers build and monetize “actors” that extract data from websites. It has become a critical part of the AI data supply chain, powering scraping, monitoring, and automation at scale. The company bootstrapped to profitability before raising capital and maintains a strong open developer ecosystem. By 2026, Apify is a global leader in web automation infrastructure.
Angel investor based in Warsaw, Poland.
Coding challenge and networking event at Google for Startups Campus in Warsaw, designed for developers and technical founders. Useful for recruiting, team formation, and early-stage product validation in software and AI-focused projects.
Organizer of DevOpsCon conferences focused on cloud-native engineering, architecture, and DevOps delivery practices.
Major software engineering conference on cloud architecture, CI/CD, Kubernetes, observability, platform engineering, and secure DevOps practices. Valuable for DevTools startups targeting technical buyers and for startup teams recruiting senior backend and cloud talent.
Community-led DevOps and software ops conference. Price: about EUR 300-400. Great for developer tool startups to find early adopters.
Developer-first conference centered on software architecture, cloud systems, and modern engineering practices. Strong channel for DevTools and infrastructure startups building technical communities with senior engineers and CTOs.
Large software and startup conference at AmberExpo with 6,000+ attendees, 500+ startups, and 200+ investors. Startup Contest offers EUR 30,000 and the agenda is especially strong for developer tools and data-heavy products.
Founded 2011. Seed fund focused on B2B SaaS and developer tools.
Tier-1 venture capital firm focused on early-stage software startups from Poland and CEE. Inovo invests from pre-seed to seed, typically backing founders targeting global markets across SaaS, developer tools, AI, and digital health.
Another Netguru co-founder, Kuba is now a notable angel investor. He co-invested alongside Wiktor Schmidt in startups like Estimote and ColibriTool, and has made several other early-stage investments on his own. He brings product insight and network connections from building one of Poland’s top software companies. Associated startups: Estimote, ColibriTool, and other Polish SaaS startups.
KAYA Ventures is a Prague-based early-stage VC backing CEE founders building global software companies. The firm invested in Better Stack from its early stages and has been an active supporter of Czech technical founders expanding into US and global markets.
Kontent.ai is a headless CMS platform that helps organizations manage and deliver content across channels.
Flagship Kubernetes and cloud-native conference with a busy Startup Hall. Price: about EUR 1500 corporate, EUR 750 individual. Ideal for DevOps, observability, and container startups.
Generative AI copilot for 3D game development and visualization workflows, with a strong focus on Unreal Engine production pipelines. The platform helps teams create assets and scene components faster while reducing technical bottlenecks for creators.
Poolside is arguably the most important "import" to the European AI ecosystem in the last decade. Founded by Jason Warner (former CTO of GitHub) and Eiso Kant, the company started in the United States but relocated its headquarters to Paris in 2024 to tap France's deep talent pool in mathematics, systems engineering, and AI research. Its mission is unusually ambitious: not just to build code autocomplete, but to create the world's most capable AI for software engineering, with a long-term goal of systems that can build and evolve software autonomously. This framing has made Poolside a defining player in the AI-for-developers category. By 2026, Poolside has established itself as a core node in the "Paris AI Triangle" alongside Mistral and H. After a massive $500M Series B in late 2024 led by Bain Capital Ventures, the company launched its flagship foundation model trained on a distinct corpus of code, software architecture, and repository-level structure. The emphasis on engineering artifacts rather than general internet text allows Poolside's models to reason about large codebases, infer intent from architectural patterns, and propose higher-level refactors instead of one-off snippets. This technical posture differentiates Poolside from generalist models and makes it uniquely useful for enterprises grappling with decades of technical debt. The company's 2026 platform looks less like a plugin and more like a "shadow engineering team." Poolside can analyze legacy banking systems, plan migrations across stacks, and coordinate changes across modules while preserving compliance and auditability. That capability has made it a darling of large financial institutions such as HSBC and Citi, and it explains why strategic investors are embedded alongside venture capital. Poolside is also scaling Project Horizon, a 2-gigawatt AI data center campus in Texas in partnership with CoreWeave, while keeping its research and model development anchored in Paris. This split setup reflects a broader pattern: US-scale compute, European R&D depth. Poolside's ecosystem ties are deep. It is a central node at Station F and an active participant in the Paris AI Hub, and its relocation is often cited by the French government as a proof point for attracting foreign tech leadership. The investor roster underscores its strategic importance: Bain Capital Ventures led the growth round, DST Global joined as a late-stage backer, Xavier Niel provided early strategic support to facilitate the Paris move, and Nvidia is a hardware partner. In 2026, Poolside stands out as Europe's most credible attempt to build an AI-native software engineering stack at frontier scale.
A tech entrepreneur and software engineer, Przemek is known in Warsaw’s startup circles as a hands-on angel. He invests in AI and developer-tool startups, often contributing code-level expertise. Associated startups: Stealth AI and developer tool companies (he keeps a low profile, but actively funds tech teams).
Early-stage angel fund led by Bartek Pucek, focused on globally scalable technology startups. The fund is known for founder-friendly terms, fast decision cycles, and co-investments with international VC firms.
Germany's Python and data science gathering. Price: about EUR 400-700 for business tickets. Great for AI startup hiring and OSS tool exposure.
Community-led Python conference in Bologna with a strong developer focus. Tickets currently list EUR 60 student, EUR 200 personal, and EUR 250 business. Great for dev-tool startups and Python hiring.
Developer platform using generative AI to help teams build software products from natural language requirements. The startup is part of the CEE builder ecosystem and raised seed funding with backing from Inovo Venture Partners.
Practitioner-led software engineering conference focused on architecture, microservices, and AI/ML engineering. Price: about GBP 2350-2900. Ideal for dev-tool and infrastructure startups.
Qdrant (pronounced "Quadrant") provides the memory layer for AI applications. As companies build AI agents in 2026, they quickly discover that large language models do not remember internal company data. Qdrant solves this by offering a high-performance vector database that stores embeddings for documents, images, and conversations and retrieves the most relevant context in milliseconds. That capability is the foundation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agent workflows across enterprises. Born as an open-source project in Berlin, Qdrant has become a default choice for teams building on modern AI stacks, especially in Rust and performance-critical environments. Its adoption accelerated because it can run anywhere—from embedded devices to large Kubernetes clusters—without locking users into a proprietary cloud. This flexibility, combined with strong performance and transparent licensing, has allowed Qdrant to surpass older competitors in developer mindshare and production deployments. By late 2025 it had raised a Series B and was widely described as a "soonicorn" within the AI infrastructure category. The 2026 breakthrough is Qdrant's hybrid search engine. Pure vector search captures semantic similarity but can miss precise keyword matches that matter in enterprise contexts. Qdrant combines semantic retrieval with keyword filters and metadata constraints, enabling queries such as "find a part like this" while also honoring exact identifiers like "Part #404-X" or compliance tags. This hybrid approach is now table stakes for enterprise RAG, and it has made Qdrant the database of choice for large-scale deployments at organizations such as Discord, Mozilla, and Deloitte. Qdrant Cloud is the company's managed service offering and is growing quickly as enterprises move from prototypes to production. It provides enterprise controls, observability, and multi-region deployments without sacrificing the portability that developers expect from the open-source core. Qdrant's ecosystem roots include Techstars Berlin and a strong open-source community, where the project has amassed tens of thousands of GitHub stars. Its investor base includes Spark Capital, Unusual Ventures, 42CAP, and IBB Ventures, giving it both global capital and local Berlin support. In 2026, Qdrant is the clearest European winner in vector databases: the infrastructure layer that lets AI systems remember and reason over real company data.
Infrastructure automation platform for engineering teams using Terraform, OpenTofu, CloudFormation, Pulumi, and Ansible. Spacelift helps enterprises manage IaC workflows, policy controls, and secure cloud deployments at scale.
Organizer of Spring I/O, a major European conference for the Java and Spring ecosystem.
Leading European conference for the Spring and Java ecosystem at Palau de Congressos, with deep technical talks by framework contributors and backend experts. Strong channel for enterprise Java, fintech infrastructure, and data-platform tooling startups.
Storyblok is a headless CMS that helps developers and marketing teams build and manage content across channels.
Developer-first event aligned with MWC week, featuring coding sessions, architecture deep dives, and hackathon-style programs around AI, cloud, and cybersecurity. Useful for startup engineering recruiting and employer branding with senior technical talent.
Tatum is a developer platform that unifies dozens of blockchain protocols into a single API, allowing enterprises to build crypto features without specialized blockchain teams. The platform abstracts wallet creation, transactions, and smart contract interactions into simple endpoints. By 2026, Tatum positions itself as the “Stripe for crypto infrastructure,” serving banks and fintechs that want to launch regulated digital-asset services. Its focus is on reliability and developer speed rather than speculative crypto exposure.
Co-founder of Divante and managing partner at Catch the Tornado, Tomasz invests in high-growth software companies shaped by strong product and engineering culture. His strategy centers on composable commerce, open-source infrastructure, and AI-powered products. Notable portfolio examples include Ramp Network, Vue Storefront, and Rigby, with broader exposure to high-value exits in the Polish tech ecosystem.
Unity Technologies was founded in Copenhagen in 2004 as a small game studio and evolved into the Unity game engine, a widely used platform for building 2D, 3D, and real time experiences. Unity helped democratize game development with a friendly pricing model, cross platform deployment, and a massive developer ecosystem. The company expanded into industries like automotive, architecture, and simulation, and it went public on the NYSE in 2020. Unity remains one of the most influential Danish founded technology companies in the global developer tools space.
Largest Vue.js conference with senior frontend engineers and tool makers. Price: about EUR 350-500. Strong for frontend tooling, UI libraries, and developer productivity startups.
Organizer of WeAreDevelopers World Congress, one of Europe's largest software engineering and developer conferences.
Europe's largest developer conference at Messe Berlin, with software engineering, architecture, and platform scaling tracks. High-leverage venue for DevTools and API startups and for founder-led engineering recruitment.