Our latest investment: Keymetrics

We’re excited to announce that we recently closed an investment in Keymetrics, a Paris-based company that makes it easy for developers to build Node.js apps. We invested $1M in a $2M seed round along with our new friends at Alven Capital.

Keymetrics makes it easy for devs to get started on PM2 in minutes

There are a number of reasons why we’re excited to partner with the Keymetrics team:

• We love smart, resourceful, technical founders. Alexandre Strzelewicz built the widely-used open source Node.js process manager PM2 with limited resources and then figured out a way to monetize by building the Keymetrics dashboard. He enrolled in Techstars, raised a seed round from Kima Ventures and recruited some of the top developers from Ecole42.
• We’re big believers in deep tech and open source. We love deep tech — a number of members of our team are engineers by training from MIPT, one of the top math and science schools in the world. We also believe in the power of open source software to bring major efficiencies to the world and we love betting on entrepreneurs leading open-source movements. We’re investors in a number of successful open-source companies such as Nginx and MariaDB and we think Keymetrics has the potential to be next in line as a leader in Node.js.
• Like all VCs, we appreciate traction. PM2 is in the top 10 Node.js packages, with 19.5M total downloads and 50K daily currently. It has 16,790 stars on Github, which compares quite favorably to many of the most popular open source projects (see below).

PM2 stacks up well against many of the leading open-source projects in the world.

PM2 stacks up well against many of the leading open-source projects in the world.

• We love the French ecosystem. France has great engineering schools, like École Polytechnique and and other Grandes Écoles and tech universities. Bpifrance, a $7.4B fund dedicated to tech startups and recent initiatives like La French Tech and the innovative startup visa program demonstrates the strong support from the French government. Our first investment in the ecosystem was Capptain, which was acquired by Microsoft. We’re also investors in Critzr and Tellmeplus and invested alongside firms like Ventech, CapHorn, and Partech. Lastly, we love French cuisine and wine — that is always a nice bonus :)

We believe that Node.js is just getting started as a backend runtime environment and will have a major impact on IoT devices that use JavaScript. PM2 has the potential to become the next industry standard for event-driven devices and we are excited to work with Alexandre and team to bring Node.js to more developers. The company is hiring as well; I encourage you to check them out here to learn more.