Hello World

At Raycast, we make developers more productive. We believe that the ever-growing jungle of SaaS tools that companies rely on, do more harm than good to a developer’s day. The continuous context switching between browser tabs to fix bugs, keep co-workers updated, or find information ruins the creation flow.

We provide developers an escape path from this jungle with a command line inspired interface for quickly accessing their tools. For the last 9 months, we have been crafting Raycast and we are excited to share three announcements today:

1. Public Beta: We’ve worked together with a limited number of beta users. During that time we’ve iterated on the user experience and built foundational extensions such as Jira, GitHub and G Suite amongst others. Today, we make Raycast universally accessible to everyone! The app can be downloaded for free as long as we are in public beta.
2. Seed Round: We have raised a $2.7 million seed round led by Andrei Brasoveanu from Accel! We’re thrilled to be part of the Accel family with their long history of backing start-ups whose mission is to improve the developer experience. Other investors are Y Combinator, Chapter One, Charlie Cheever (Co-Founder of Expo & Quora), Calvin French-Owen (Co-Founder and CTO of Segment), Manik Gupta (Former CPO of Uber), Zach Holman (Startup advisor and early GitHub engineer) and more.
3. Developer Program: A lot of highly-rewarding productivity tools are custom to the setup of individuals, teams or organizations. To support such setups, we’re building an API that allows developers to automate their workflows and we're aiming at establishing a community around it. From today on, we accept signups for the developer program and can’t wait to push Raycast to the next level with developers around the world.

This is a big milestone for our team and we wanted to share our progress and what the future holds for Raycast:

How we build software has changed tremendously during the last decade. Our personal experience at fast-growing companies showed us that following processes has become more important than delivering output. We got frustrated by how much time we spent on tracking bugs, managing sprints, commenting on pull requests, and many other things other than crafting high-quality software.

We realized that our frustration with the tooling is common amongst developers. Most work tools aren’t optimized for powerusers. They are bloated, slow, and miss keyboard shortcuts. And quite often simple things, like closing an issue, takes several minutes. The crux is that employees are trapped with their companies’ tools and can’t migrate to alternatives. Since our announcement of a private beta, thousands of developers have signed up for our waiting list and are eager to level up their productivity!

Raycast provides developers with quick access to their tools. The app cuts through the noise by unifying tools as commands and optimizing efficiency by making them accessible through a few keyboard shortcuts. It already connects with many popular services such as Jira, GitHub, and G Suite amongst others. With Script Commands you can automate your workflows even further.

Because we operate with sensitive data, we took care of privacy in Raycast. The app doesn’t require a login and sensitive data is encrypted on the local hard drive. All API requests go directly to the third party services and we don’t track any sensitive information. Furthermore, Raycast is implemented natively for macOS to deliver the best performance with the least amount of resources. We not only make developers faster, but also don’t slow down their machines.

Today, we're announcing our developer program that will provide early API access for building custom extensions. We know that we can’t build all extensions ourselves. But, we can serve the toolkit a developer community needs, to shape the ecosystem of productivity tools they desire.

Thank you for being part of our journey. We deeply appreciate your help and just getting started.