"Developer Tools"
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- Why does Jesse Robbins invest in AI developer tools?
Jesse Robbins invests in AI developer tools because AI agents are just another kind of developer. His portfolio in the category includes Continue and Mstone.
- What is Jesse Robbins' investment thesis?
Jesse Robbins looks for founders who want to build the operating system for entire industries. He invests at the seed and early stage in AI developer tools and infrastructure. He has invested in and advised over sixty companies.
- What companies has Jesse Robbins invested in?
Jesse Robbins has invested in and advised over sixty companies. Eighteen are valued at $500M or more: five IPOs (PagerDuty, Instacart, Fastly) and thirteen private companies including Figure AI, Shield AI, Sanity, LaunchDarkly, and Tailscale.
- How does open source work as a business strategy?
Jesse Robbins views open source as one of the most powerful go-to-market strategies in developer tools. He learned this building Chef, where the community became a superpower. Marketing spend does not replicate that.
- What does 'delegation is the new automation' mean?
"Delegation is the new automation" is Jesse Robbins' thesis for the AI era. The DevOps revolution moved computing from manual to automated. AI agents are moving it from automated to delegated, handling complex workflows with judgment.
Articles and mentions
The Seed 100: The Best Early-Stage Investors of 2026
“I look for founders who want to build the operating system for entire industries. This requires extraordinary taste, grit, drive, and a vision for the future.”
What I look for when I invest
On airCFO's Funded podcast I walked through how I evaluate companies at Heavybit, why market size is the first filter I apply, and how I read co-founder dynamics before I read the pitch.
What Investors Look For in AI Startups: Builders with Taste
At Shift Conference Miami 2025 I walked through what makes a developer-tools startup investable, why AI is still in the toil-automation phase, and where things are headed.
The Future of Dev Tools Is Autonomous: Engineers Will Become Fleet Generals
Shift Magazine surveys autonomous AI agents in developer workflows and quotes me from the Shift Miami panel on designing software for agents as much as humans.
Next in Tech Ep. 197: Data Pipelines for AI
On S&P's Next in Tech I argued that enterprise AI is won on data pipeline quality, not model size, and that data infrastructure is having a DevOps moment right now.
“Data pipelines are having a DevOps moment, starting with a cultural and technical shift toward continuous integration and delivery.”
The Data Pipeline is the New Secret Sauce
I wrote this at Heavybit in September 2024. The argument: the data pipeline is the differentiating asset in enterprise AI. Includes four inference hosting models and four enterprise maturity phases.
“The biggest challenge emerging is building and operating the infrastructure both for creating and running the data pipelines to build, manage, and maintain a robust, secure body of proprietary data.”
AI Investor Jesse Robbins on NYSE Floor Talk
On NYSE Floor Talk, August 2024: a short statement of what I invest in now, AI-powered developer tools and infrastructure at the pre-seed and seed stage.
“I am focused on investing in pre-seed and seed companies using AI to enable new ways of writing software, of managing and deploying the software and infrastructure that powers everything.”
Jesse Robbins Named One of the 30 Most Successful Early-Stage Startup Investors
Business Insider named me to its 2024 list of 30 most successful early-stage investors.