Today, the team behind Fleetsmith (acquired by Apple in 2020) emerges from stealth, Tempest, launching with $3.2 million in funding led by Abstract Ventures. The startup delivers a complete developer platform that can be deployed in hours instead of months, helping engineering teams ship better code faster.
While tech giants spend years and millions building internal developer platforms, most engineering teams are left with a painful choice: cobble together fragmented tools or build everything from scratch. Spotify introduced Backstage to help address this problem, but even after years of availability, it still requires significant setup time and ongoing maintenance—an investment of time and resources that most teams simply can’t afford.
Tempest's seed funding round attracted industry heavyweights, with participation from Box Group and Background Capital, alongside strategic investments from Max Mullen (co-founder of Instacart), Jason Chan (former VP of InfoSec at Netflix), and Mike Abbott (former VP of Engineering at Apple). This collective bet on Tempest's vision reflects a growing reality: companies can no longer afford to waste engineering talent on infrastructure tasks instead of innovation.
According to Mullen, Tempest is the missing developer experience tool that every engineering team needs.
The startup was founded by Ken Kouot, Lukasz Jagiello, and Eric Skram following Apple's acquisition of their previous company, Fleetsmith. After spending years at Apple, the team saw a persistent challenge: companies hire specialized engineers only to burden them with infrastructure tasks instead of customer-facing innovation.
"Poor developer experience isn't just a developer problem—it's an existential business risk," says Tempest co-founder and CEO 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."
What sets Tempest apart is its unique two-pronged approach. The platform combines a comprehensive internal developer portal for service visibility and tracking with a powerful DX platform that enables true self-serve workflows. While other solutions stop at showing what's happening in the stack, Tempest turns insights into action with built-in automations that work out of the box. The platform comes with a rich ecosystem of integrations that can be easily extended through its developer-friendly SDK, eliminating the months of setup typically required with existing solutions.
“In my experience, the most effective organizations provide developers with clear, secure pathways—what we now call 'paved roads' and something we introduced early on in my career at Netflix," commented Jason Chan, VP, Information Security at Netflix (10 year Netflix veteran). "Tempest makes it easy to implement those pathways, removing the friction that slows down teams and putting security and compliance on autopilot.”
The numbers back this up. McKinsey reports that companies with high-quality developer platforms see revenue growth four to five times faster than their peers. Yet most organizations spend months or years trying to build these platforms internally, often ending up with complex systems that engineers refuse to adopt.
"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," said David Kwon, Partner at Abstract Ventures. "We believe the Tempest team is creating a best-in-class developer experience, and we are grateful to be supporting them."
Starting today, Tempest is publicly available with transparent pricing including a free tier for teams up to 10 seats, making enterprise-grade developer platforms accessible to organizations of all sizes. The platform can be deployed without the months of setup and specialized teams typically required, enabling companies to capture immediate value. By focusing on complete self-service capabilities rather than just visibility, Tempest helps teams go from zero to full developer enablement in hours, not months.
"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," commented Jake King, Founder of Cmd (acquired by Elastic in 2021). "They take care of the commonalities, provides opinionated best practice guidance, and lets Engineers get back to innovating solutions their customers crave," added Jesse Adametz, Director of Engineering, Infrastructure at Twilio
