Developer Tools · Remote
Forge
A build system for teams whose code is half-written by models.
- Stage
- Series A
- Founded
- Founded 2021
- First invested
- We invested 2021
- Team
- 38 people
- Board
- Board seat
- Total raised
- $18M
- Current stage
- Series A
- Team
- 38
- Founded
- 2021
What they build
The product, in plain terms
Forge builds a build system for teams whose code is half-written by models. The company started in Remote in 2021. We backed it at pre-seed and have worked with the team through Series A.
- 01
A product engineers adopt on their own before anyone signs a contract.
- 02
Performance treated as a feature, with benchmarks published rather than claimed.
- 03
A commercial layer that begins where a team stops being one person and becomes an organisation.
Where it stands
Numbers the team watches
Reported by the company at its most recent board meeting. We publish what founders are comfortable publishing and nothing more.
- Weekly active teams
- 2.6K
- Free to paid conversion
- 97%
- Median setup
- 1 days
Why we invested
The note from the first meeting
“We met Forge in 2021, back when developers loved things they would not pay for, and that gap was where most of these companies stalled. Two other firms passed in the same month. We thought they were solving for the wrong risk, and we were happy to be alone on the cap table for a while.”
- Signed its first design partner before the program ended.
- Shipped the enterprise tier without hiring a single sales engineer.
- Turned down an acquisition offer in year two and was right to.
Founders
Who is building it
Both founders were in the room the day we wrote the check, and both still run the company.
Uma Iyer
Co-founder and CEO
Came from the regulator side, which is unusual and turns out to matter.
Chiara Marchetti
Co-founder and CTO
Came from a hardware background, which shows in how little the system assumes.
Timeline
How it has gone
The version we would give another investor, including the years where nothing looked like progress.
- 2021
Founded
Uma Iyer and Chiara Marchetti start Forge in Remote around a single wedge: a build system for teams whose code is half-written by models.
- 2021
We invested
We wrote the pre-seed check and took a board seat. Priya Nair has worked with the team ever since.
- 2022
Paid customers
Contracts replaced pilots, and the company stopped selling a roadmap and started selling a product.
- 2023
Series A round
Raised at $110M, led by an investor we introduced during diligence. We took our full pro rata.
- 2026
Where it stands
38 people, selling in more markets than it started in, still run by the two people who wrote the first version.
Alongside us
Co-investors
We share rounds with people we would want on our own cap table.
- Amplify Partners
- Foundation Capital
- Emergence
- Bessemer
Working here
Open roles
Forge is hiring in these areas. Mention us and the note gets to the founders directly.
- Systems engineering
- Developer relations
- Growth
Building something next to Forge?
We are usually early to a category and happy to be early again. Send us the short version.