Tempest secures USD $3.2m to revolutionise developer tools

Tempest has launched with USD $3.2 million in funding, aiming to address platform engineering challenges faced by technology businesses.

The company was founded by former members of Fleetsmith, which Apple acquired in 2020, and emerges from stealth with the goal of providing a developer platform that can be deployed within hours, contrasting with the months-long setups conventionally required by most internal developer platforms.

Tempest's funding round is led by Abstract Ventures, with contributions from Box Group and Background Capital, and strategic investments from industry figures such as Max Mullen, Jason Chan, and Mike Abbott, showing significant confidence in Tempest's concept. These investors support the idea that engineering talent should focus on customer-facing innovations rather than being burdened with infrastructure tasks.

"Poor developer experience isn't just a developer problem—it's an existential business risk," said Tempest co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ken Kouot. "Take a simple feature deployment: when your engineers spend three days wrestling with CI/CD pipelines instead of shipping customer value, that's not just lost engineering hours—it's delayed revenue and missed market opportunities. At Tempest, we're giving developers the foundation they need to deliver innovation at the speed your market demands. In today's environment, streamlined software delivery isn't a nice-to-have—it's the difference between leading your industry and playing catch-up."

Tempest aims to differentiate itself via a two-pronged approach, combining a comprehensive internal developer portal and a robust developer experience platform. This approach facilitates self-serve workflows and diminishes the usual extensive setup periods, enabled through its developer-friendly software development kit.

Jason Chan, Vice President of Information Security at Netflix, commented: "In my experience, the most effective organizations provide developers with clear, secure pathways—what we now call 'paved roads,' 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."

Industry analysis from McKinsey suggests that organisations with high-quality developer platforms witness revenue growth four to five times faster than those without. Despite this, many companies still struggle with the complexity and time investment required to build these platforms in-house.

David Kwon, Partner at Abstract Ventures, shared his viewpoint: "When we met Ken and the Tempest team, we knew they weren't just creating another dev tool—they are building the foundation that future engineering teams will be built on. We believe the Tempest team is creating a best-in-class developer experience, and we are grateful to be supporting them."

Echoing this sentiment, Jesse Adametz, Director of Engineering, Infrastructure at Twilio, stated: "Developer Platform roadmaps across the industry are far too similar considering the unique nature of each business they're trying to serve. Tempest takes care of the commonalities, provides opinionated best practice guidance, and lets Engineers get back to innovating solutions their customers crave."

Jake King, Founder of Cmd, addressed security concerns: "My infrastructure security background has shown me how fragmented deployment tooling can create both operational friction and security vulnerabilities. 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."

Max Mullen, co-founder of Instacart, expressed excitement about his investment, saying: "Tempest is the missing developer experience tool that every engineering team needs—which is precisely why I'm so excited to be an investor."

The platform is now publicly available with a free tier for teams up to 10 seats, enabling small teams to benefit from enterprise-grade developer platforms. This accessibility aims to enable immediate value capture across organisations of varying sizes by providing comprehensive self-service capabilities rapidly.