Deno, the event firm behind the eponymous Deno runtime, as we speak introduced that it closed a $21 million Collection A spherical led by Sequoia that brings its complete raised to $26 million. In keeping with CEO Ryan Dahl, the brand new money will probably be put towards constructing out Deno’s industrial providing, Deno Deploy, whereas rising advertising and marketing operationd and exploring new strains of enterprise.
Deno is a runtime for JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly primarily based on the Rust programming language and the V8 JavaScript engine initially developed for Google Chrome and Chromium internet browsers. Co-created by Dahl, who additionally created Node.js, Deno goals to supply a “productive” and safe scripting surroundings that can be utilized to handle servers, carry out scientific computations, and extra.
A prolific engineer, Dahl launched Deno in 2019 with Bert Belder, the cofounder of StrongLoop, an organization constructing instruments and companies on prime of Node.js. “Broadly, the aim of the corporate is to additional using JavaScript exterior of the browser,” Dahl advised Nob6 in an e-mail Q&A. “The principle drawback is the way to tame the large complexity of various and distributed infrastructure that’s the internet.”
Dahl sees Deno as a continuation of Node.js, which lets builders use JavaScript for server-side scripting (i.e., working scripts server-side to provide dynamic internet web page content material). Deno seeks to resolve Node.js’ lack of interoperability, and — not like Node.js — it’s optimized for serverless computing, the place cloud suppliers summary away server useful resource administration.
“You give [Deno] a JavaScript operate that takes a request and returns a response, and we will serve that at scale indefinitely at zero price — if it’s low visitors,” Dahl defined.
Deno the corporate contributes to Deno the open supply challenge, which already has tens of hundreds of weekly lively customers on GitHub. A full-time group of engineers works on Deno, addressing points and bugs and deploying new releases. However Deno additionally sells entry to the aforementioned Deno Deploy, a managed Deno service working on prime of a community with 33 areas around the globe.
Dahl sees Cloudflare Staff as most intently competing with Deno Deploy, adopted by Vercel, Netlify, and Fastly. However Deno has notched just a few wins up to now, together with a collaboration with Slack to develop the latter’s next-generation improvement platform.
Deno can also be a member of an initiative between Node.js and Cloudflare to permit the switch of apps between Cloudflare Staff, Deno, and Node.js with out the necessity for a rewrite, a feat that’s presently past attain.
“There’s an enormous quantity of financial strain to enhance the infrastructure across the internet — whether or not that’s browsers themselves or the servers that host web sites or the databases,” Dahl mentioned. “[Our goal is to provide] very optimum, very low cost cloud companies.”
Apart from Sequoia, 4 Rivers Ventures, Rauch Capital, Lengthy Journey Ventures, the Mozilla Company, and Shasta Ventures have backed Deno. The corporate at present has 17 workers, and plans to rent 10 extra by subsequent yr.
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