Nx lands $16M to build ‘monorepo’ tools for software devs

Nx, a startup developing tooling to make it simpler for software dev teams to work within a single code repository, today closed a $16 million Series A round with participation from Nexus Venture Partners and a16z.

The funding will be used to expand Nx’s fully managed product, Nx Cloud, to make it more of a replacement for existing continuous integration tools, such as Jenkins, co-founder and CEO Jeff Cross told TechCrunch in an email interview.

“Having all dev workforces go remote during the pandemic, companies realized more of the pains and overhead of siloed development, and the benefits of using evergreen ‘monorepos’ instead,” Cross said. “Many companies are claiming to solve all aspects of developer experience, which overwhelms decision makers with too many choices. Our approach is more prescriptive and narrowly focused.”

Prior to launching Nx, Cross and Nx’s other co-founder, Victor Savkin, were working at Google on the Angular team — the team responsible for maintaining the Angular framework for building web apps. They left Google to start an Angular consulting business in 2016, but say that they saw a pressing need for tools to make it simpler for devs to store related apps and libraries in one shared code repository.

“We created the open source build system, Nx,” Cross said. “Most of our focus is on the JavaScript ecosystem, but Nx is language-agnostic and can build anything. Developers can write private or open source plugins to improve support for specific languages or frameworks, much like the first-class plugins maintained by the Nx core team.”

Nx’s core product is a cloud-hosted version of Nx, the aforementioned Nx Cloud.

“The primary value of Nx and Nx Cloud is that we help product development teams ship more features faster,” Cross said. “We do this by making it easy to move all parts of a product into a single repository … Then Nx & Nx Cloud have several layers of intelligence to make builds (i.e. turning a repo into a running app) fast by only building what needs to be built, caching task outputs whenever possible and then distributing the work optimally.”

Now, so-called monorepos confer advantages, like ease of reuse and streamlined collaboration across teams. But they also have disadvantages, namely requiring additional storage by default and a lack of per-project access control.

That’s to say that monorepos might not be for everyone. But there’s a customer base clamoring for it — Nx, which has a 37-person team, claims to have hundreds of subscribers and more than 15 million installs of the open source Nx project per month.

“We’ve more than doubled our enterprise customers and quintupled our software-as-a-service revenue,” Cross said. “We’ve got more than two years of runway, and strong pull from enterprise customers — we keep hiring to keep up with our inbound pipeline of enterprise deals.”