Complexity. 

That’s the word that comes to mind first when discussing modern software applications. Development teams have to innovate, and quickly, to keep pace with business needs, all while needing to ensure quality and security within those applications. 

It’s that word – complexity – that the companies below are addressing in their offerings. Whether in support of digital transformation, cloud adoption, coding practices or application security, these are the companies our editors have selected to keep an eye on in 2023.

Secure Code Warrior

WHAT THEY DO: Code security

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Development teams learn while they code to prevent security issues before they happen. Its secure coding skills platform gives developers the training they need as security “shifts left” into software architecture and development. The company’s  approach to learning combines defensive and offensive, framework-specific coding challenges and hands-on missions to rapidly build your security posture.

Torc

WHAT THEY DO: AI-driven on-demand developer marketplace

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Founded September 2021 by the C-suite that put Topcoder on the map, Torc’s intelligent talent marketplace matches remote software developers with jobs at global enterprises across every vertical. Torc provides unlimited career growth opportunities for its developer community, as well as a scalable, secure, AI-driven talent sourcing experience for companies worldwide. In 12 months, Torc’s community, customers, job opportunities and bookings have more than doubled each quarter, making Torc a preferred platform for on-demand technical talent.

YourBase

WHAT THEY DO: Software test acceleration

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: The company’s package installs into the codebase and plugs into existing CI workflows to deliver test results faster. Underlying the software is a dependency graph that traces the code base to understand the execution paths that tests take, and only runs the tests whose paths overlap with the code changes being evaluated. As a result, builds that took up to an hour or more finish in seconds or a few minutes every time.

Prefect

WHAT THEY DO: Data flow automation

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Prefect’s platform allows companies to streamline their workflows and schedule when applications run. Most applications have a preset schedule to run — which at times does not correlate with what a company is using it for — and Prefect can help customize when it runs and make sure it is taking in all the data it should.

Stytch

WHAT THEY DO: Authentication for developers

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Stytch’s platform enables developers to add authentication in minutes with out-of-the-box solutions. With Stytch’s APIs and SDK, developers can use the auth platform to help their organizations streamline onboarding and authentication, drive user engagement, and increase conversion.

OctoML

WHAT THEY DO: Automated ML model deployment

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Spun out of the University of Washington by the creators of Apache TVM – an open-source stack for ML portability – OctoML makes AI more sustainable through efficient model execution and automation to scale services and reduce engineering burden. In June, the company announced an update that enables app developers and IT operations teams to transform trained ML models into agile, portable, production-ready software functions that easily integrate with their existing application stacks and DevOps workflows.

Wilco

WHAT THEY DO: Developer upskilling

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: By unbundling professional development from employment, Wilco aims to reduce that gap and give everyone the chance to both gain new skills and master existing ones at an accelerated pace. The company released the first live version of its software in June, with comic-book-looking ‘quests’ that developers can go on and learn from those tasks.

LinearB

WHAT THEY DO: Continuous improvement

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: LinearB’s solutions provide developers with DORA metrics to see what’s going on in their pipeline, and shows you how to improve the quality of your code through automations of pull requests and merges. The company believes that with the right data, software development teams can speak a common language with business leaders, team leads can remove delivery bottlenecks and ship faster and devs can help their teammates more and be happier at work.

ClickUp

WHAT THEY DO: All-in-one project management

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Billing itself as “one app to replace them all,” ClickUp’s tools can create dashboards that bring all reporting into one place, automate routine tasks and assign work, and enables collaboration from ideation through project development. And, if you don’t want to abandon all the tools you’re now using, ClickUp can integrate with them and provide the needed data.

Jellyfish

WHAT THEY DO: Bridge business and IT

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: On its website, Jellyfish wants “every engineering leader to become a business leader.” Its solution ensures the engineering organization is focused on what matters most to the business, and enables clear communication with senior stakeholders both within and outside of the engineering organization for contributing to the product strategy and company direction.

Bridgecrew

WHAT THEY DO: Cloud-native security

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Bridegecrew – acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2021 – offers a way to embed security into a development team’s tools and workflows, as part of the company’s Prisma Cloud’s Cloud Native Security Platform. The Bridgecrew solution offers Infrastructure-as-Code security, software composition analysis and supply chain security.

OpenAI

WHAT THEY DO: Artificial intelligence R&D

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: OpenAI is a research laboratory that has created an API that provides access to GPT-3, for performing natural language tasks; and Codex, which translates natural language to code. It has created DALL-E (like the artist Dali), an AI system that can generate original images and artwork from a natural language description; and Whisper, a neural network that approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition.

Coherent

WHAT THEY DO: Software-as-a-service

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Coherent’s Spark solution can transform business logic locked in spreadsheets into no-code APIs, enabling business teams to more easily collaborate with IT to create value with internal systems, partners and new market opportunities. Coherent Spark transforms business logic into APIs that can integrate with virtually any platform.