Hey everyone, Yahia here.
Today I get to share some big news: Context.dev has raised a $9M seed round, led by General Catalyst.
Instead of a press release, I want to share why I started this company in the first place. Because that reason is the only thing this money is for.
Why I started this
I started Brand.dev, the company that became Context.dev, with one simple, stubborn idea: any developer, anywhere in the world, should be able to build software that understands the world it's serving. An app should know who it's talking to. A product should greet a new customer with their own logo and colors instead of a blank form.
The data to do that was already out there on the open web, but getting it was hard. You either signed an enterprise contract and sat through sales calls, or you built a pile of scrapers and babysat them forever. Neither option worked for a small team that just wanted to ship.
So we built the opposite. Self-serve. No lock-in. You can cancel anytime. Great data at a reasonable price, behind an API you can call in a couple of minutes. I wanted to make the internet a more interesting place, and Context is my way of doing that.
What changed along the way
We started with logos, colors, and fonts, and we got really good at them. But then customers started asking for more. Could we pull products from a site? Answer a question about a company? Turn any page into clean Markdown? Crawl a whole domain? No matter what customers asked me for, I usually ended up saying yes.
Then agents showed up, and the question changed. It wasn't "how do I personalize this page?" anymore. It was "how does my agent read the internet?"
An agent is only as good as the context it has. A brilliant model that can't see the web is guessing. That's when it clicked for me: what we had been building all along was Context. Earlier this year Brand.dev became Context.dev, and our job got a lot clearer: give agents the internet.
Today teams use Context.dev to keep data on more than 20 million companies fresh, to power 3,000+ integrations, to give Similarweb's AI agents the datapoints they need, to build a 2M+ food and supplement database, and to ship an onboarding MVP in an hour. Along the way we joined Y Combinator and launched Highlights so agents spend their tokens on the parts of a page that matter.
And through all of it, we have never shipped a breaking change. Not once.
To everyone building
If you're building an agent, a product, or a company right now: you shouldn't need a scraping team before you can ship. You shouldn't need a sales call to find out what something costs. You should be able to give your software the internet, today, and get back to the part only you can build.
That's what we're here for. Grab an API key and see what your agent can do when it can actually see.
And if you want to help build this with us, reach out. We'd love to hear from you.
Thank you
To our customers: thank you for trusting us with your products, reporting weird edge cases, and telling us what you needed next. Most of what Context.dev is today exists because one of you asked for it.
To General Catalyst and Y Combinator: thank you for believing in what we're building.
To my team: thank you for the late nights and for caring this much. I'm proud of what we've built, and I'm even more excited about what comes next.
We're still very early. The best is ahead.
- Yahia Bakour, Founder of Context.dev