Developer productivity startup Warp said today it has closed on $23 million in funding, including $6 million via a seed funding round and $17 million through a Series A round.

The new funding was led by Dylan Field, co-founder and chief executive of Figma Inc., with participation from Elad Gil, Salesforce.com Inc. founder Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, and Next Play Ventures. The round came as the company, officially known as Denver Technologies Inc., announced the launch of its superfast modern command-line terminal, which is aimed at making developers more productive.

Warp is aiming to revamp the venerable developer terminal, which it says is long overdue. Although the terminal is used by software developers every day to write, build, run and deploy code, it is a relic of the past and has not been meaningfully improved in more than 40 years. Warp said this means developers waste countless hours trying to learn, use and collaborate in an archaic tool.

Warp founder and CEO Zach Lloyd said the terminal is one of two main apps that most developers use daily. So it’s crazy that it doesn’t support any of the modern user interface and collaboration features that are so commonplace in other software apps.

“On the same computers that are running Figma and Google Docs, developers are still using terminals familiar from 1980s hacker movies for many of their core workflows,” Lloyd said.

Warp changes that, reinventing the terminal, connecting it to the cloud and making it work for teams. The Warp terminal is built natively in the Rust programming language and features an interface that’s more suited to modern workflows.

Most important, it changes the basic interface primitives of the terminal, which are text input and output, to adapt to the way modern developers work. With Warp, text input is similar to a modern day text editor, while output works similarly to a data notebook. In addition, Warp is intelligent, helping developers by suggesting commands for commonly used tools and offering dozens of built-in workflows to save developers time.

In addition to the refreshed capabilities, Warp tailors to the collaborative nature of development teams today. Using Warp, developers will be able to assist each other, debug outages collaboratively and share knowledge, all from within the terminal. “Warp is making a 10-times better, multiplayer terminal and the opportunity is enormous,” Field said.

Developers have showed a lot of interest in Warp, with the company reporting that thousands of them have signed up for the waitlist for the private beta since last summer. Today, thousands are using Warp on a daily basis. As of today, Warp is now available in public beta for anyone to try out.

Warp received a nice testimonial from none other than Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, who is currently working for a startup in stealth mode.

“I have been using Warp every day at work,” he said. “My favorite thing is the speed, both in terms of how fast it works and also how fast you feel while using it, especially the excellent typeahead and search. Warp brings terminals into the modern day and I can’t wait to see where they take Warp.”

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that just when you think there’s no more innovation to be had in a certain area of developer tooling, along comes a surprise, such as what Warp is doing.

“There is plenty of room for improvement with the terminal, as with all software that has not seen innovation for multiple decades,” Mueller said. “But the terminal is nothing if not familiar to developers, so the right balance needs to be struck.”

Warp said it will use the funding from today’s round to grow its engineering team and continue building its product.

Images: Warp