Seattle-based developer platform Diagrid is emerging from stealth with more than $24 million in funding.
The funding, announced Wednesday, includes a $20 million Series A round and a previous $4.2 million seed round. Diagrid co-founder and CEO Mark Fussell said the company plans to grow its 10-person team to between 20 and 30 people over the next year.
"We'll hire engineers and developers who will actually help other developers build more of those building blocks," Fussell said. "We're going to be growing the company and hiring sales people, hiring customer success people and hiring engineers."
Fussell and fellow co-founder Yaron Schneider, also the company's chief technology officer, are based in Seattle, but the rest of the team is spread throughout the U.S. and Europe, Fussell said.
As Diagrid grows, the company plans to have people in the Seattle area but will probably still have people spread out, he said, adding that the company doesn't have office space and likely won't for the near future. The company occasionally uses a coworking space.
Diagrid, founded in 2021, helps developers gauge the performance of systems running applications. Fussell and Schneider previously worked at Microsoft and, while there, created a developer system called Dapr that provides the building blocks for creating applications.
If building an application is like building a car, Fussell said, then Dapr would be a system to provide manufacturers with ready-to-use engines and windshields, and Diagrid would be like the dashboard to tell manufacturers if everything in the engine is running properly.
Norwest Venture Partners led the Series A round, while Amplify Partners and Quiet Capital participated. Amplify led the seed round. Norwest has invested in billion-dollar companies in Seattle like the e-commerce startup Fabric and the interviewing startup Karat.
As for the company's name, Fussell said the inspiration comes from architecture, where a diagrid is series of beams intersecting on a diagonal.
"We're inspired by this because we are a company that wants you to build an architect software in unusual ways and in very different ways," he said.
