Today, I’m thrilled to be announcing our seed investment in Aspect, the future of developer productivity.

Build Tools & Bazel

Build tools have always been necessary to developing software – all programming languages must turn into something that a machine can read – but building software has always been a fragmented experience across languages and frameworks: C++ has CMake, Rust has Cargo, PHP has Phing, iOS has Xcode, Java has Maven, and so on. The downstream headaches and productivity strains of managing this separate tooling are felt across almost every modern dev organization. 

Enter Bazel, the multi-language build tool that allows teams to build multiple binaries (backends, web UIs, mobile apps) in a single command without being constrained to one language’s idiomatic, specific build tool. A staggering number of the most valuable technology companies in the world have standardized on Bazel, including: Adobe, Asana, Braintree, Canva, Databricks, Etsy, LinkedIn, Lyft, Nvidia, Pinterest, Snap, Stripe, Uber, and VMware. Why?

Bazel is reshaping the world of software development.  

1. Bazel directly addresses the decades long shift to multi-language environments: organizations of all sizes and levels of complexity are adopting best-of-breed languages for their development teams, and Bazel helps them consolidate it all.
2. Bazel is FAST: Bazel caches all previously done work, and tracks changes to both file content and build commands. Bazel also supports highly parallel and incremental builds. (In plain english: Bazel intelligently knows what’s already in production, only works on what’s net-new, and can scale across as many machines as you’ll give it).
3. Bazel scales: Bazel can work with multiple repositories, user bases of 10k+, and source file counts of >100k. 
4. The rise of monorepos: monorepos allow teams and services to work in the same repositories, share the same dependencies, and maintain the same standards. All of this is enabled by having a multi-language build tool. 

Aspect is leading the charge of this paradigm shift with the work it’s done around making Bazel adoptable, manageable, and effective.

Aspect’s Journey

Over two years ago, I reached out to Alex & Greg to gauge their perspective on the ecosystem of build tools. At the time, they were running a consulting firm that was providing Bazel services to over 50 companies. Alex and Greg were incredibly well known in the Bazel community; both come from Google, where the project started anagrammatically as “Blaze,” Google’s internal build system. Both separately authored the canonical Bazel plugins across JavaScript, Typescript, and Node.js. At the time, I remember wishing they had started a business that I could invest in!

Fast forward to today, and Alex and Greg have turned the hours and weeks of insight earned from serving their clients into an incredibly exciting product, Aspect Workflows: a developer platform to vastly speed up builds and time to production while reducing build and CI costs. Aspect’s happy customers include Airtable, Sourcegraph, Stairwell, Coda, VideoAmp and AssemblyAI, who are accelerating their builds 10x, tests 2-3x, and achieving 40-60% cost savings on their build automation. 

Alex and Greg are the exact type of founders that we are excited to be in business with: n of 1 technologists who understand a domain better than anyone on the planet, and who are equally as unique in their discipline, product instincts, and ability to drive their ecosystem forward. Bootstrapping the business with services was an incredibly difficult but fortuitous path to proprietary insights and customer relationships, and one that has been forged by many open source peers like Confluent, Databricks, Heptio, Cloudera, and Hortonworks. 

We are incredibly excited to be partnered with Alex and Greg as they pursue their vision to transform how software teams operate!

Click here to learn more about Aspect.