Here's the pitch deck the founders of DEV used to raise $11.5 million to build the Facebook for software developers

• DEV, a startup that is building a social network geared to software developers, has raised $11.5 million in a Series A round led by Mayfield.
• CEO Peter Frank said he and his co-founders are building "the world's most inclusive and constructive platform for programmers of all backgrounds and experience levels."
• Mayfield's managing director called the DEV platform a Facebook for software developers, and that there's big opportunity for social networks serving specific niches.
• DEV currently has 5 million unique monthly visitors and expects to have 30 million by the end of 2021. The startup eventually plan to generate revenue from other services, including hosting, support and consulting.
• Here's the pitch deck the founders of DEV used to raise $11.5 million from VCs led by Mayfield.
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Launching a new social network in the age of Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat sounds crazy. But the founders of the startup DEV believe there's room for a social platform that caters to an important audience: software developers.

DEV is a social network geared to software developers, a platform where they can share and test ideas, and engage with fellow programmers and engineers.

"What we're building is the world's most inclusive and constructive platform for programmers of all backgrounds and experience levels," DEV cofounder and CEO Peter Frank told Business Insider.

The New York City-based startup on Monday announced that it has raised $11.5 million from venture capital firms led by Mayfield.

Navin Chaddha, managing director of Mayfield, called DEV "an open, decentralized Facebook for developers."

"These guys have unique values and a big vision to transform the social network industry," Chaddha told Business Insider. "If you look at social networks like Facebook, these are too broad, too consumer-oriented. Now we want to see vertical networks that are going to get formed around specific professions."

He said DEV aims to serve the needs of 30 million to 40 million software developers who already use different platforms to work with and engage with one another - such as Stack Overflow, a popular question-and-answer site used by programmers, and GitHub, a popular software development platform.

Frank, the DEV CEO, developers also interact on other social platforms, but he said he and his co-founders -- Ben Halpern and Jess Lee -- wanted to build a more inclusive site, where developers of different backgrounds can feel more comfortable.

"There are definitely segments of existing social platforms that can be very unfriendly and unwelcoming and hostile to beginners or people that might as nearly fit into that all boys club of the stereotypical software developers of the 80s and 90s," he said.

The DEV platform, which launched in 2017, currently has 5 million unique monthly visitors. The startup expects to have 15 million uniques by the end of next year, to have 30 million by the end of 2021.

Frank said that unlike other social media platforms, "our business model is not predicated on hoarding user data in order to serve increasingly targeted advertisements," he said - an apparent reference to Facebook and its ad-driven business model.

He said DEV, which currently has 13 employees, plans to generate revenue by offering services, including platform hosting, support and consulting. More specifically, it hopes to offer premium tools for those who want to use DEV's platform technology to launch and support other social networks of their own.

Chaddha of Mayfield said, "This is really a software company. This is not a media-model type of company."

The startup's platform expects to grow even faster with the rise of the "low-code, no-code" trend in the software industry in which professionals, such as product managers and designers, are able to use and even develop software tools even with very limited knowledge of programming languages and computer science.

"Software developers really rely on the collective wisdom and expertise of fellow software developers to maintain productivity. We felt that what the internet was really missing was a modern, constructive social platform for programmers."

Here's the pitch deck DEV used to raise $11.5 in a Series A round: