There’s a strip from the webcomic xkcd called “Dependency” showing a very flimsy-looking tower of boxes that represents digital infrastructure in the modern age. As you bring your eyes down to the bottom of this anxiety-inducing tower, you see this one block that’s foundationally supporting the entire structure. It’s labeled “a project some random person has been in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.”

There’s truth in the comic. If you haven’t worked in software development before, the importance of open-source projects and tools in the building process can’t be stressed enough. For the teams that work on building those projects and tools, it can often feel overwhelming to keep the community of developers using your code happy with limited resources. crowd.dev recognizes this challenge (with the founders building the startup from personal experiences), and wants to offer the best platform to help developer teams manage and interact with the communities around their products. Its Eagle Eye feature—which takes in messages from a number of sources and uses natural language processing to sort through them—particularly stands out to us as a tool that can save developers plenty of valuable time that would normally be spent juggling feedback from across many different platforms. With its pre-seed announced a little over two weeks ago, crowd.dev may still be very early into its journey, but it’s definitely building a product that’s in much need.