Scaling AI Builds: Hermetiq’s Data Layer for Bazel and DevOps Innovation

0:00The SaaS CFO: Greetings, everyone. I'm excited to welcome Jake Newfield, CEO and co-founder at Hermetic. Jake, welcome to the show. Great to be here. Yeah, great to have you here. Let's kick things off. Tell us a little bit about your background.

0:11Jake Newfield: Sure. So, been in tech for 13 years, started in sales, moved into product management. So, did sales at Cloudera, Salesforce, some startups, got an MBA at Columbia Business School, and then pivoted into product management at Akamai and Encore. and then joined NativeLink where I was the head of customer success and sales and met my now co-founder, Tim. Tim was the CTO at NativeLink. And so 13 months ago, 14 months ago, Tim and I co-founded Hermetic.

0:44The SaaS CFO: Okay, perfect. Yeah, I saw a long sales, successful sales background. And I want to get into some in a second, but for listeners new to Hermetic, give us the 30-second pitch on what Hermetic does.

0:54Jake Newfield: So with the advent of agentic coding tools like Claude, Cursor, Codex, code volume and code complexity is exploding. So the ability to create new code is no longer a bottleneck for companies, right? Because any software engineer can now create 10x, 100x more code than they used to be able to. The bottleneck is rapidly becoming the build process. So after you have all this code, for that code to be delivered and deployed and be production ready, it has to be built, which means compiled, tested, verified. And that is not solved by AI today because AI, these tools, Claude, Cursor, et cetera, don't have the data necessary to fix the builds.

1:37Jake Newfield: And Hermetic is that data layer. So Hermetic is providing that intelligence layer to the agents to automate the build process for software development.

1:47The SaaS CFO: And then I was on your landing page and I admit I had to Google Build Barn and I say is it Bazel or Bazel?

1:54Jake Newfield: Yeah, Bazel. I call it Bazel. Some people call it Bazel too.

1:58The SaaS CFO: Either way. And so are you looking at specific, say, code source systems that you work with or it could be anybody coding on any kind of application?

2:07Jake Newfield: Anybody coding on anything? So our platform today, the easiest way to think of it is like Datadog for Bazel. So Bazel is the initial build system that we've decided to enter the market with. So Bazel's our wedge into the market. We have a platform that provides observability into Bazel. So the way to think about Hermetic today is Datadog for Bazel. and whoever's using Bazel, the reason why they're using Bazel is because they have these massive polyglot code bases. So we don't care what types of code or someone's using. If they use Bazel, then that tells us enough about them.

2:49The SaaS CFO: Okay. And then what led you to start this company with the history in sales and product management? Seems pretty technical. So what was the trigger to start this?

2:58Jake Newfield: So my co-founder and I were at our previous company and we said to ourselves, there's a big opportunity in this space. Let's go chase it. Let's create the company, the product that we believe is necessary for this industry. So we left and started this 13 months ago because in the Bazel world, there's lots of consulting companies, there's lots of different orchestrators, and there's Bazel is the client-side implementation of the REAPI protocol. There's the server-side implementation, of which there are many, BuildBarn being one of them. And we didn't want to provide just yet another server-side implementation of the REAPI protocol.

3:36Jake Newfield: We wanted to provide an intelligence observability layer on top of those to actually show developers what's going wrong and how to fix it. Because all of the users we had spoken to really indicated the same thing, which is that their Bazel builds break, they're slow, and they don't know why. They don't know why the cache is missing or the build is failing because there is no insight into that.

3:58The SaaS CFO: Okay. And then I assume you're going after the dev team. Who's your ICP for this?

4:02Jake Newfield: Engineer, software engineer. Someone who's working on DevOps, DevTools, working with Bazel.

4:07The SaaS CFO: Okay. And then could this be any company size, a couple engineers up to hundreds of engineers, or do you have a sweet spot there?

4:15Jake Newfield: So the companies that typically feel the pain point that we're solving, namely builds are taking too long, builds are breaking down, they don't know why. That's often, it's really correlated with code complexity and code size. So monorepo size. So bigger organizations have been the ones that today we're having the, we're finding ourselves having the most conversations with. That being said, so by virtue of having this observability layer for Bazel, this data dog for Bazel system that we have today, by virtue of that, we've put ourselves in a position to now go from observability, showing them why the builds are breaking, why things are failing, to actually making the fixes, like having our product make the fixes ourselves and thus creating self-healing builds or a build engineer as a service agent is what we're building towards.

5:02Jake Newfield: So in a period of months or sooner, we should have, our product should be able to actually fix Basel builds instead of just showing what developers should fix.

5:14The SaaS CFO: Yeah, interesting. And is this, let's say, your category that you're after here, I'm guessing, is this a pretty new market? Would this have not existed, say, two years ago or three years ago? Obviously, with the advent of AI coding tools, sure, after that. But how fast is this market moving right now?

5:29Jake Newfield: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. So Bazel used to be a very niche tool. It was created by Google as an open source project. It was internal at Google. It was called Blaze. And then Google open sourced it and called it Bazel. Once Google realized that other companies beyond Google now had massive monorepos that required the same type of Bazel system to do the builds. But up until somewhat recently, this is a more niche technology used only by companies with massive monorepos. But now because of agentic AI, agentic coding in the last couple of years, Bazel is going from a niche tool to something that more and more companies are going to need.

6:08The SaaS CFO: Interesting. All right. So from Google to open source and now maybe expanding even farther. And so going after the dev teams, product or tech leaders. So what, curious about your go-to-market motion, what's working right now in go-to-market? it?

6:20Jake Newfield: Yeah. So starting the company, really just use Slack, LinkedIn, just direct outreach, just me sending messages to individuals, try to get phone calls going. That was, we had a little bit of inbound, people finding our website, logging in, using the product and me reaching out to them, but really a lot of outbound and a lot of very high response rate just from engineers I'm reaching out to. As we start to really scale out our product, we're going to have a more traditional go-to-market engine, sales marketing. We're actually sponsoring. We're one of the sponsors at BaselCon this year. So BaselCon is in Amsterdam next month.

6:59Jake Newfield: We'll be a sponsor, so we'll have a booth. That will be an opportunity to meet more customers. And yeah, I think going forward from this point, we're going to engage with more partnerships and more traditional marketing activities. But thus far, it's really just been direct outreach.

7:14The SaaS CFO: Okay. And I'm curious, everybody has kind of different strategies for conferences. Now that seems like your sweet spot to go to that. What's, as a founder, what's your expectation when you pack up the booth and leave that conference, built pipeline, built brand awareness, both?

7:29Jake Newfield: Pipeline. I want to have, I don't know, 50, I'd say 50 first name, last name, email company of people that are somewhere between maybe interested to really interested anywhere on that spectrum i

7:43The SaaS CFO: want 50 of them okay yeah okay that'll be interesting and then 13 months in or 12 months in pricing always iterates and pricing obviously a hot topic with ai tools today but tell us a

7:54Jake Newfield: little bit about your pricing mechanism yeah not much to tell we're figuring that out we have yeah we are we're we're figuring that out we have plenty of plenty of models we've built and things that we floated but up until today is september 2nd like we don't have enough paying customers to really okay to justify a cemented pricing model okay okay so a little bit of flex

8:22The SaaS CFO: on that and so if like i came to your booth in amsterdam like hey i'm ready to sign up with this Would it be like, all right, sign me up for a subscription or a subscription plus a little usage or?

8:35Jake Newfield: Yeah, and see how much cash he has in his pocket. And then I'm just kidding.

8:38The SaaS CFO: Yeah.

8:39Jake Newfield: Yeah. So we're offering free 30-day trial. I would say ask me this question in about two weeks and I'll have a better answer. But yeah, this is in flux. We'll have this locked in before Bazelcon for sure. Oh, yeah.

8:51The SaaS CFO: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Those conversations probably come up in the booth, hopefully. So yeah, interesting. Yeah. Pricing so hard and so many ways to go with it. So I'm curious, so you've raised so many, looks like maybe about$2 million. How much have you raised to date so far?

9:03Jake Newfield: A little more than$2.2.

9:05The SaaS CFO: Okay,$2.2. And was that the first capital raise then?

9:09Jake Newfield: Yeah, so this$2.2 encapsulates everything we've raised since November. So little safe notes here and there. Okay. We had a cohort of lead investors come in with a$1.6 financing. So prior to that, we had$600K between safe and convertible note primarily.

9:28The SaaS CFO: Okay.

9:29Jake Newfield: And I would say investors include Naran Tantopole from Google, leader at Google, Jason Calacanis, and those are two of the prominent ones.

9:37The SaaS CFO: Yeah. And where is that money being focused right now on the product or elsewhere?

9:41Jake Newfield: Product, really. So engineering for the purposes of building the product.

9:44The SaaS CFO: Okay. All right. And then curious, you're only, say, still in early innings here, but is there a number that kind of best explains your business right now or what's happening in your business that you focus on?

9:58Jake Newfield: What do you mean?

9:59The SaaS CFO: Or is it really like sometimes ARR is popular or product usage or what's an important number to you at this stage?

10:06Jake Newfield: Yeah, so the really exciting thing for us is we got one of the top, and I won't say the name, but one of the top four AI labs. You know, the four being XAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. We got one of them to, they are now using Hermetic in production for all plus 2 million of their builds each day, which comes out to roughly north of 4 billion build events per day. And so what they're using Hermetic for, it's not to run their builds, it's to visualize the build data. So Hermetic is the way in which this company is able to actually look at and see what's going on with their Basel builds. which is really only scratching the surface of what our product intends to do, right?

10:52They're just using Hermetic to see the build data, how do they improve it?

10:56Jake Newfield: But why we've become a business is much broader than that. This is just stage zero, showing the data. We intend to automate this process so that sooner than later, they don't have to look into the data that we're providing, that Hermetic just automates it. Okay. That's the plan.

11:14The SaaS CFO: Yeah, definitely. And I'm curious around still in early stages here, but anything, any surprising things along your journey here building this company that you would not have expected when you founded it, say, 12 months ago, 13 months ago?

11:26Jake Newfield: Yeah, I don't know. It's definitely been challenged. There's. I have to think about that.

11:31The SaaS CFO: Yeah.

11:32Jake Newfield: Yeah. Come back to that.

11:34The SaaS CFO: Okay. Yeah. Sounds good. And now this question may be hard. Maybe we have to put this on the back burner, too, but pretty sounds like new category. Things moving fast. how dramatic or different do you think this market will be in three years or could you not even tell what the pace of ai today and you're just kind of looking quarter by quarter at this

11:50Jake Newfield: yeah i like to address the problem immediately in front of me and i could speculate but it's not going to be anything so profound because it's just speculation yeah and that's the thing is the

12:01The SaaS CFO: things are moving so fast who knows but jake appreciate the time few stats and figures before we wrap up today, what's, do you have a headquarters location?

12:10Jake Newfield: Los Angeles.

12:11The SaaS CFO: Okay. All right. And then LA headquarters and so founded then 2025.

12:16Jake Newfield: Yep.

12:17The SaaS CFO: All right. And then current staff count, employee count.

12:20Jake Newfield: We've got, so it's me and my co-founder and we have another full-time employee. And then we've got two contractors who I think of more or less as full-time employees. Hopefully will become full-time employees soon. And then we have a legal consultant. But yeah, today there's five on payroll.

12:39The SaaS CFO: All right, perfect. Best wishes at the conference in Amsterdam. Hopefully you get those 50 hot leads. If listeners would like to learn more, where should we send them online?

12:49Jake Newfield: Yeah, hermetic.com. So H-E-R-M-E-T-I-Q.com or just email me, jake at hermetic.com.

12:55The SaaS CFO: All right, perfect. We've got his email, everyone, and we'll put that in the show notes so they can click on that and learn more. and again, Jake, appreciate you sharing your insight and your journey so far. Maybe we can check in 12 months from now and see how things are going.

13:06Jake Newfield: Yeah, sounds great.

13:08The SaaS CFO: All right, thanks.

13:09Jake Newfield: All right, take care.