Deno Raises $21M – but is anyone using it yet?

After raising a $4,900,000 seed investment back in March 2021, Deno has just announced quite a substantial round of Series A investment of $21 million. The funding round led by Sequoia brings its total investment to $26 million to date.

Deno will mainly use the cash to build their commercial offering Deno Deploy.

Admittedly, I shamefully wrote Deno Deploy off as a Deno-specific Heroku. Still, after the announcement, I looked deeper at Deno Deploy, and it’s so much more than that. While the name might sound like a continuous integration tool, it’s a Runtime As A Service (RaaS) platform allowing you to run scalable code.

I could see Deno Deploy being useful for scalable APIs for IoT devices and other use-cases.

Sadly, despite Deno 1.0 being released over two years ago now, Deno still feels like a niche Node.js alternative that people have thought about using or looking into but haven’t taken the leap into building something with it.

In case you’re not aware, Deno is the brainchild of Node.js creator Ryan Dahl and is seen as a continuation of Node.js to address some of the fundamental flaws (security and environment-related) Ryan has been very vocal about over the years.

I mean no ill intent towards Deno because I want it to succeed. Everything about it on paper is excellent, and the brief experimentation I have had with it was promising. In my opinion, the native support for TypeScript is a very underrated feature.

Still, despite wanting to build something Deno, I do not have enough time to dive into it. The company I work for hasn’t got the time or money to look into a new Javascript environment, even if it is leaps and bounds better than Node.js.

I also know nobody in my network using Deno, and it’s a shame. I still intend on building something with Deno when I get the time, but the events over the last couple of years with the COVID-19 pandemic have thrown a spanner in the works for many businesses, and people who had their lives turned upside down.

Are you using Deno, or have you even tried it yet?