The 50 Developer Tools companies that produced the most founders (2026)

A founder factory is a company whose people leave to start companies of their own. This ranks every company in the graph by how many of its alumni — people who founded it or worked there — went on to found at least one company, counting only ventures started no earlier than the company itself.

Refreshed 2026-10-05 · updates nightly

#	Company	Sector	HQ	Founded	Founders	Companies started
1	Palantir Technologies	Developer Tools	United States	2003	5	21
2	MongoDB	Developer Tools	New York City, USA	2007	5	6
3	Docker	Developer Tools	Palo Alto, USA	2010	4	5
4	Cloudflare	Developer Tools	San Francisco, USA	2009	4	3
5	Weaveworks	Developer Tools	London, United Kingdom	2014	4	3
6	Cursor	Developer Tools	San Francisco, USA	2022	4	2
7	Athina AI	Developer Tools	—	—	3	4
8	GitHub	Developer Tools	San Francisco, USA	2008	3	3
9	GitLab	Developer Tools	San Francisco, USA	2011	3	3
10	Loudcloud	Developer Tools	Sunnyvale, USA	1999	3	3
11	Baseten	Developer Tools	—	—	3	2
12	DeepCode	Developer Tools	—	—	3	2
13	Graphite	Developer Tools	—	—	3	2
14	Neon	Developer Tools	—	—	3	2
15	Neon	Developer Tools	—	—	3	2
16	Grafana Labs	Developer Tools	New York City, USA	2014	3	1
17	Hansoft	Developer Tools	—	—	3	1
18	OpenHands	Developer Tools	—	—	3	1
19	OpenHands AI	Developer Tools	—	—	3	1
20	Releasehub	Developer Tools	San Francisco, USA	2019	3	1
21	Tailscale	Developer Tools	Toronto, Canada	2019	3	1
22	Split	Developer Tools	United States	—	2	6
23	Mixer Labs	Developer Tools	San Francisco, USA	2008	2	5
24	Portkey	Developer Tools	—	—	2	4
25	Ximian	Developer Tools	Boston, USA	1999	2	4
26	Atlassian	Developer Tools	Sydney, Australia	2002	2	3
27	Catena	Developer Tools	United States	—	2	3
28	Gradient	Developer Tools	—	—	2	3
29	Stack Overflow	Developer Tools	—	2008	2	3
30	Heptio	Developer Tools	United States	—	2	2
31	Lob	Developer Tools	San Francisco, USA	2013	2	2
32	Railway	Developer Tools	San Francisco, USA	2020	2	2
33	Sentient	Developer Tools	—	—	2	2
34	Serverless Stack	Developer Tools	San Francisco, USA	2017	2	2
35	Twilio	Developer Tools	San Francisco, USA	2008	2	2
36	Webflow	Developer Tools	San Francisco, USA	2013	2	2
37	Agency AI	Developer Tools	—	—	2	1
38	AgentOps	Developer Tools	—	—	2	1
39	Bucket	Developer Tools	—	—	2	1
40	CodiumAI	Developer Tools	—	—	2	1
41	Hasura	Developer Tools	San Francisco, USA	2017	2	1
42	LaunchDarkly	Developer Tools	Oakland, USA	2014	2	1
43	Magnific AI	Developer Tools	—	—	2	1
44	Obvious (fka Flatfile)	Developer Tools	—	—	2	1
45	Opbeat	Developer Tools	—	—	2	1
46	Redalyc	Developer Tools	Mexico	2002	2	1
47	Replit	Developer Tools	San Francisco, USA	2016	2	1
48	StackBlitz	Developer Tools	—	—	2	1
49	Starburst	Developer Tools	Boston, USA	2017	2	1
50	Tempo Labs	Developer Tools	—	—	2	1

How this is counted. A person counts as an alumnus of a company if they founded it or worked there. They count towards the company’s score if they went on to found at least one other company that was started no earlier than the company itself. Universities and other non-commercial organisations are pruned from the graph where we can identify them. Data is community-corrected — fix something.