Monorepos are becoming an increasingly popular way to manage source code, but they require a slightly different toolset. Google developed its own inte

Aspect Build gets $3.85M to help developers create software with Bazel

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2024-10-02 04:30:06

Monorepos are becoming an increasingly popular way to manage source code, but they require a slightly different toolset. Google developed its own internal build and test tool on top of its monorepo and then, in 2015, open sourced it as Bazel. Nine years on, there is a thriving ecosystem of Bazel-adjacent startups like NX and EngFlow that aim to make the tool a bit easier to use.

Also among them is Aspect, which was co-founded by CEO Alex Eagle and CTO Greg Magolan, who both previously worked on Bazel, Angular and adjacent projects at Google. COO Jenny Magolan and CXO Eva Howe, who have a marketing and legal background, respectively, are also cofounders. The company today announced a $3 million seed led by FirstMark Capital. That’s in addition to a $850,000 friends and family round the team raised earlier to bootstrap the development of Aspect.

While Bazel is extremely powerful, it is hard to use. In many ways, its origins as an internal Google tool still show. “Google has this reputation of: ‘we hire the smartest engineers, and therefore we can throw the most complicated tools at them,” Eagle said half-jokingly. Like other startups in this ecosystem, Aspect aims to improve the developer experience on top of Bazel.