Fresh Ink! Welcoming Zed and the Future of Coding at the Speed of Thought

By: Patrick Chase and Erica Brescia

The ink: Zed’s $10M Series A funding

Investors: Patrick Chase and Erica Brescia

The scoop: Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer code editor built by the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter.

The Zeditors: It’s incredibly rare to come across a team that has made it their life’s work to solve a singular problem. That was the case with Nathan Sobo, Antonio Scandurra, and Max Brunsfeld and building the best code editor. The code editor is one of the pieces of software that software engineers use the most during their day and the Zed team couldn’t get away from wanting to improve it. They previously built the Atom code editor at GitHub, but after 5+ years, 59k github stars, and getting 9.3% of engineers to use Atom, they decided it still fell short of their dream code editor. So they started over. Started over from scratch and decided to build from the ground up in Rust, optimizing for speed.

Building Zed in Zed: Zed’s goal was to build an editor that would allow engineers to code at the speed of thought and they’ve done just that. In addition, the Zed team imagined a future where developers could collaborate seamlessly with each other and collaboration would move from the pull-request to the line of code. Today, they are building Zed in Zed and have three pillars for the product:

1. Speed — Zed is built from the ground up in Rust (140k lines of Rust today) to achieve lightning fast speed. Every millisecond an editor lags is lost productivity for engineers, which is why Zed designed their editor to get out of an engineer’s way and allow them to get their ideas into code as fast as they think.
2. Collaboration — Developers can work on code together like Google docs or Figma. Typing at the same time, following each other’s cursors, and reviewing code in between pull-requests. Zed envisions a world where developers move seamlessly between single player and multiplayer, rather than sitting down for lengthy pair programming and screen sharing sessions.
3. Conversations Close to Code — A developer will be able to right-click on a chunk of code, drop a deep link to a colleague, and the colleague will be able to immediately see their typing, leave notes, and chat.

Zed is the culmination of 2 years of focused development, but nearly 16 years of obsessing over how to build a better editor. We think it’s pretty cool, but don’t take our word for it. Give Zed a try here if you are interested! Also, they are hiring!