Ottawa-based Gadget has raised $8.5 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners.
The financing also saw participation from Greg Brockman, co-founder and CTO at Open AI; Koen Koppen, CTO at Klarna; Solmaz Shahalizadeh, head of data science and engineering at Shopify; and other undisclosed investors.
Founded in 2020 by former Shopify employees Harry Brundage and Mohammad Hashemi, Gadget describes itself as a developer productivity company with a mission to help e-commerce developers to cut down on time spent writing pages of code.
By bundling the tools, libraries, APIs, and best practices of engineers into a single platform, Gadget allows developers to write their own code and also have the access to a set of advanced primitives, such as instant API integrations, and integrations to other SaaS platforms.
“As developers ourselves, we know firsthand how demotivating it can be to find yourself bogged down, building a feature you’ve built a thousand times before, instead of focusing on the actual user problem at hand,” said Brundage. “Gadget gives ecommerce developers their time back so that they can start, build and scale apps in a fraction of the time it takes today.”
Brundage worked at Shopify for about five years, starting as Javascript developer in May 2011 and ending off his tenure at the company as director of engineering for core software.
Hashemi joined as a Shopify product manager in December 2013, and became a general manager for the company’s FinTech initiatives until he departed in 2018.
Prior to joining Shopify, Hashemi founded Fitech Group, a tech and product management consulting firm that specialized in payments and fraud detection solutions.
Geared up with seven previous Shopify employees and fresh funding, Gadget intends to launch its complete serverless stack, and build connections to popular third-party APIs, starting with Shopify.