New York/New Orleans/Munich, April 16, 2021 – Charm, a startup focused on modernising the command line, has raised $3m in seed funding. The round is led by Cavalry Ventures, with participation from Fuel Capital and Betaworks Ventures, as well as numerous angel investors. The injection of capital will support the company’s mission to create a new paradigm for interacting with computers by applying modern product thinking to one of the original forms of human-computer interaction: the command line.
“The GUI and desktop metaphors were a good fit for document-based applications of the 90s but with the Internet and pervasiveness of computing, effectively manipulating data has become a core use case for computing. We think the command line is the best place to do that,” says Toby Padilla, one of Charm’s co-founders.
The team has already launched three products: a new version of Glow, their open-source terminal-based markdown reader; Charm, a command-line-first account management tool; and the Charm Cloud, a set of terminal-first online services. The new tools give users a way to read documentation in the Terminal and create a private library of stashed and encrypted markdown files. They also include a terminal based-account system and open-source Go libraries and APIs so developers can extend and build on the Charm stack.
“We wanted to think about how identity can work on the command line without needing to open a web browser. The new version of Glow allows users to stash markdown to our cloud using the Charm account without ever having to log in or manually create the account,” comments co-founder Christian Rocha.
We are currently experiencing a renaissance of open source, which is attributable to three main factors according to Claude Ritter, managing partner at Cavalry Ventures: “The growing significance of developers in a company and thus their increasing budgets, the maturity of the SaaS business model and the quality that open source products guarantee by their DNA, being thoroughly tested and fixed within a short time period by the users themselves”.
Padilla was previously the VP of Mobile at Last.fm and TweetDeck and Rocha was the Creative Director for Huffington Post and head of voice for Zenly (acquired by Snapchat). The team also includes open-source developer and Last.fm alumni Christian Muehlhaeuser. Charm operates fully distributed from New York, New Orleans and Munich.
Previously, Charm has raised a pre-seed round from Betaworks, Fuel Capital, Kevin Carter, Tokyo Black, Giphy-founder Alex Chung and a host of other angels. Max Howell, the Homebrew-founder and former teammate of Padilla and Muehlhaeuser, serves as an advisor to the company. Rocha and Padilla are planning a series of future launches that expand on their goal of modernising the command line computing experience.
About Charm
Charm is building the next generation of command-line interfaces. While outdated, CLIs still offer significantly more efficient usage of computers. Charm's ecosystem will turn the CLI into a 21st-century experience by providing tools to improve the visual appearance, to automate commands, to store data such as user profiles or SSH keys in the Charm Cloud and to exchange configurations between developers.
Charm was founded by Toby Padilla and Christian Rocha.
For more information: https://charm.sh/ and https://github.com/charmbracelet.
About Cavalry Ventures
Cavalry Ventures is one of the leading European early-stage funds focusing on pre-seed and seed stages with EUR 120 million in assets under management.
Cavalry Ventures was founded in 2016 by Rouven Dresselhaus, Claude Ritter, Stefan Walter, Markus Fuhrmann, Marcel Hollerbach, and Dominik Matyka. In addition to the expertise of the partners, the portfolio companies gain access to a cross-sector, global and exclusive network of more than 180 angel investors, entrepreneurs, scientists, business experts, and many more, who provide advisory and operational support in areas such as strategy, organisational development, product development, sales, international expansion, recruiting and marketing.
The portfolio comprises 40 companies, including McMakler, REKKI, PlanRadar, Bryter and Forto. Cavalry Ventures is headquartered in Berlin and invests across Europe. For more information: www.cavalry.vc.