DEVOPSdigest

Warp formally launched with its fast modern command-line terminal so that entire development teams can be more productive at building, running and debugging code.

Tens of thousands of developers have signed up for the waitlist for the private beta since last summer, and thousands of developers use the application daily. The product is in public beta starting today.

“It’s crazy that one of the two main apps that every developer uses daily doesn’t support any of the modern UI and collaboration features that have become standard across all productivity software over the past 10 years. On the same computers that are running Figma and Google Docs, developers are still using terminals familiar from 1980s hacker movies for many of their core workflows. Warp modernizes the terminal, making it collaborative and team-friendly, bringing it into the 21st century,” said Zach Lloyd, founder and CEO of Warp.

The terminal is used by every developer every day to write, build, run, debug and deploy software, including most of the software that powers the cloud. However the terminal has not been meaningfully improved in the last 40 years. As a result, developers waste countless hours trying to learn, use and collaborate in an archaic tool that could otherwise be spent building and shipping software.

Warp’s founder and CEO Zach Lloyd sought out to modernize the terminal, enabling every developer to be as productive as a command-line expert. He leveraged his experience leading engineering on Google Docs, which fostered a similar transformation in office productivity software. Together with a team of productivity software veterans, including Shikhiu Ing who led the design team on Google Docs, Warp has reinvented the terminal, connected it to the cloud and made it work for teams.

Warp is a super-fast application, built natively in Rust, with an interface tailored to modern workflows. Warp changes the basic interface primitives of the terminal — text input and output — to adapt to the way developers work today. Input works like a modern text-editor, and output works like a data notebook. Moreover, Warp works out-of-the-box to make terminal input delightful and powerful by suggesting commands for commonly used tools and providing built-in workflows to save developers time.

Besides building for the individual developer, Warp is also building for the fundamentally collaborative nature of modern development teams. Whereas the regular terminal is a single-player app, Warp is introducing features that enable developers to help each other, debug outages together and share knowledge.

Warp has raised $6 million in a seed round led by GV with participation from Neo and BoxGroup and a $17 million Series A round led by Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma. Other participants include Elad Gil, Silicon Valley’s biggest solo venture capitalist, Jeff Weiner’s Next Play Ventures and Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures.

"Warp is making a 10x better, multiplayer terminal and the opportunity is enormous,” said Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma. “Like design, we will never look back.”

"There are few tools as widely used by developers as the terminal, and there is a need for dramatic improvement. Warp takes a groundbreaking approach to rebuild the CLI with a modern, collaborative UX that resonates with distributed development teams,” said Erik Nordlander, General Partner at GV and Warp Board Member. “GV is excited to support Zach Lloyd and the Warp team as they reinvent one of the most important developer tools."

"We are delighted to once again partner with a great entrepreneur, Zach Lloyd," said Marc Benioff. "Developers will greatly benefit from the genius of Warp.dev."

Warp plans to use the money to grow its engineering team and continue to advance its product as it goes to market in 2022.