We are excited to announce that Matchstick Ventures Fund II has completed an investment in Zed. Zed is a high-performance collaborative code editor for software developers.

Background: With the explosion of software has come an explosion of software developers, with tens of millions of developers operating around the world. According to Evans Data Corporation, there were 26.4 million software developers in the world in 2019, a number that is expected to grow to 28.7 million in 2024. Software developers have quickly become the most important creators of the 21st century, and they are highly valuable to organizations in terms of their time and effort, as well as their pay. With their rise has also come an increased need for tools and services to help them do their work effectively, efficiently and have more fun.

COVID-19 accelerated the remote work trends especially for teams of developers who are all working together on the same project, but from different and far-away locations. These teams are looking for new ways to collaborate with each other effectively, despite operating in different time zones or parts of the world.

Effective collaboration is especially important because of the abundant evidence that the best software is written in collaboration with other developers. Rather than operating in silos, software developers are looking for ways to work together and are seeking technology that can help them cooperate and join forces with their peers.

Company Specifics: Zed is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), building a code editor that enables software developers to collaborate with each other in real time and asynchronously to write better and faster code. While most current tools operate around the merging of different software together, Zed integrates collaboration directly into the heart of the coding experience, the text editor.

Too often, code conflicts or opportunities to improve aren’t recognized until after the code is already written when teams attempt to merge their code together. Zed solves this problem by utilizing a native IDE editor that allows for collaboration while code is being created. Much like how Google Docs revolutionized how writers collaborate on documents, or Figma revolutionized how designers collaborate documents, Zed revolutionizes how software editors and engineers collaborate on code (or documents).

Zed’s IDE software has been developed from the ground up to be incredibly fast, exceeding the expectations of software developers and users who have become accustomed to tools that are clunky and dated, holding back the developers potential. Zed allows developers to not only do more work faster, but also to have a more responsive and resilient interface on which to do that work.

Zed’s CEO Nathan Sobo previously led the development of the Atom IDE while at Github, which is currently used by millions of people worldwide. With a decade of experience in IDE software, his experience and knowledge is invaluable in this space, and he believes he was put on this planet to help make Zed a reality. Zed is based in Boulder, with two co-founders distributed around the world, and many connections in the local startup community.