Nx Raises $8.6M to Make JavaScript Monorepos Mainstream

Narwhal Technologies Inc, the company behind the popular open source build system Nx (nx.dev), announced today that it closed a $8.6M seed financing to continue expansion of its Open Source ecosystem and subscription products Nx Cloud and Nx Enterprise. The financing round was co-led by Nexus Venture Partners and A16z, with participation from several prominent angel investors.

Nx has established itself as the leading tool for managing complex JavaScript monorepos, grossing more than 12 million downloads on npm per month. And with the Nx team recently taking over the 2nd most popular tool in the space, Lerna, the company's footprint accounts for more than 75% of JavaScript monorepo tool usage, measured by npm downloads. Lerna and Nx have more than 49k stars on GitHub.

From startups to enterprise, JavaScript development teams at organizations of all shapes and sizes are recognizing the benefits of developing code in monorepos: single source code repositories containing source code for many teams, applications, and libraries. Monorepos help teams increase compatibility and collaboration across projects, helping to avoid duplication of code, and ship products faster.

But without proper tooling, monorepos can be cumbersome to manage both from an organizational perspective, and a performance perspective. Nx gives teams the tools they need to cohabitate happily, while helping keep builds and tests fast, even as the codebase grows. Teams can use Nx's commercial product, Nx Cloud (nx.app), to speed up their automated processes even more using its Distributed Computation Caching and Distributed Task Execution.

"We're at a pivotal point in how development teams collaborate and ship code, and Nx is leading the charge," said Jeff Cross, CEO of Nx. "With this additional capital, and the resources of our new partners, we can execute more quickly on even more ambitious solutions to the challenges of collaborating at scale."

"We're thrilled to join hands with the Nx team and welcome them to the Nexus family of over a dozen marquee open-source companies built on product-led growth. Monorepo adoption is exploding worldwide, driven by advantages like ease of collaboration, shared codebase visibility, dependency management, and refactoring. However, as monorepos scale, robust tooling becomes essential to managing them, and Build Time becomes a critical factor. This is where Nx shines. We were drawn to Nx because of its world-class team, category leadership, strong developer community, and massive global adoption: from startups to Fortune 500 companies. We're grateful to Jeff and Victor for choosing us as their partner in this journey," said Abhishek Sharma, Managing Director at Nexus Venture Partners.

"More frontend teams are owning the full application logic, but they are still missing purpose-built tools which allow them to collaborate and move fast. We believe there's no better team than Nx to tackle this problem - Jeff and Victor have been the thought leaders of the frontend ecosystem for the last decade. With their industry knowledge, customer-centric approach, blazing fast performance and strong community, Nx will let teams build fast without breaking things," said Jennifer Li, Partner at a16z.