Internal developer portal startup Port, officially known as GetPort.io Ltd., said today it has closed on an $18 million Series A funding round, bringing its total amount raised to $23 million.

Today’s round was led by Team8 and saw participation from its lead seed round investor TLV Partners, plus angel investors that included JFrog Ltd. Chief Technology Officer Yoav Landman, Check Point Software Ltd. and Cata Networks Inc. co-founder Shlomo Kramer and former Twilio Inc. Chief Product Officer Eyal Manor.

Port is looking to ease one of the major headaches of software developers. These days, developers spend an enormous amount of time on mundane DevOps tasks, whether they involve adjusting things themselves or creating tickets for other team members to resolve.

Generally, developers prefer to live entirely within their integrated development environment of choice when they are coding, since it has all of the tools needed to do their jobs in one place. However, when it comes to DevOps, they’re forced to use multiple tools, cloud services and portals to get things done.

Port aims to remedy this, abstracting away all of those DevOps environments, cloud resources and processes. It places them inside a unified portal from which they can perform numerous self-service DevOps tasks with a few clicks. It enables developers to access, check, review, understand and modify their infrastructure resources and components through a single portal.

The advantage for developers is they get to save more time, improving their velocity. Even the most routine DevOps tasks can be extremely cumbersome, especially for someone who’s so used to the simplicity of an IDE, which puts everything at their fingertips. For example, even a simple task such as adding a cloud resource such as an S3 bucket to a microservice might require them to access multiple platforms, clouds and vendors. It causes frustrating delays as the constant context switches disrupt their workflow.

Port is at the forefront of an emerging Platform Engineering movement that seeks to provide a better experience for developers, making them more self-sufficient. With Port, developers can define their own data models within a comprehensive catalog that categorizes resources by type, so microservices, cloud resources and environments can easily be located and made accessible. Then, engineers can choose which self-service capabilities to enable for each resource. According to Port, this doesn’t just help make developers’ lives easier, but also drives better engineering quality by setting organizational standards with scorecards and golden paths.

In addition to today’s funding round, Port announced an expansion of its platform with the launch of Port Ocean, which is an open-source extensibility framework that makes it possible for anyone to create exporters, self-service actions, automations and integrations and add them to Port’s catalog.

Port co-founder and Chief Executive Zohar Einy said that because every company delivers software differently, each needs a developer portal that can adjust to specific needs and lifecycles. “Port provides platform engineers and developer experience groups the tools to build the portal they need, streamlined with how the business does engineering, instead of forcing an opinionated and rigid structure and tools,” he said.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that enterprises have long been looking for ways to boost developer velocity, and explained that automation of non-coding tasks is one of the best ways to enable developers to spend more time actually coding. “Port’s solution is platform engineering, but because every software development environment is different, the only viable strategy is an open approach,” Mueller said. “This is exactly what Port is doing, and it’s good to see the validation of its strategy and business model with another, bigger round of financing. It’s going to be interesting to see where this gets Port in the coming months.”

Port reckons it has seen rapid adoption of its platform in the months building up to today’s funding round. It said its open approach has helped it to gain dozens of paying customers and cultivated a vibrant community of software organizations looking to invest in platform engineering.

“This success is driven by user involvement, with users offering features, creating integrations and sharing knowledge in Port’s community,” Einy added.

Platform engineering is growing in importance because software companies need to make sense of the hundreds of tools and processes developers are using today, said Team8 co-founder and Managing Partner Liran Grinberg. That’s why he’s investing in Port. “Of all the different approaches to solving the problem, Port truly understands that a developer portal needs to be able to meet the needs of a million different tech stacks while still being simple to implement and maintain,” he said.

Photo: Port