SF Ruby News - June 2026

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World 06-26 • June

Acquisition

Salesforce Acquires Fin for $3.6B

Salesforce signs a definitive agreement to buy Fin, the AI customer-service company that was Intercom until last month's rebrand, for roughly $3.6 billion, the largest acquisition ever of an Irish-founded tech company. Fin's AI Agent runs on its purpose-built Apex model, all of it on Intercom's 2M-line Rails monolith.

The deal lands a month after Intercom renamed itself Fin and crossed $100M ARR, growing 3.5x inside a $400M+ ARR business. It's Salesforce's fifth acquisition of 2026, joining M3ter and Contentful, and feeds an Agentforce business that reached $1.2B ARR last quarter. Expected to close in Q4 of Salesforce's fiscal 2027.

June 15, 2026 · Salesforce

Read the announcement

Conference

SF Ruby Startup Conference Announced

November 10–12, 2026 · SFJAZZ

Our first conference: three days at SFJAZZ in San Francisco, keynoted by Garry Tan, President & CEO of Y Combinator. Tickets aren't on sale yet; sponsorships are open now.

Conference details

Event

RubyConf 2026 Heads to Las Vegas

July 14–16, 2026 · Red Rock Resort

Ruby Central's flagship conference returns for three days of talks, live coding, and community in Las Vegas, welcoming everyone from newcomers to teams at global companies. The room block at Red Rock Resort closes June 19.

Event

SF Ruby Meetup, June @ PlanetScale

June 18, 2026 · 108 Natoma St.

Jeremy Evans on "Implementing Core Set," Alan Ridlehoover's "Indispensable: What Human Computers Can Teach Human Programmers," plus a PlanetScale talk and interest circles. Hosted with Sam Lambert. 108+ RSVPs.

RSVP on Luma

Acquisition

1Password Acquires Apono

The Rails Foundation Core member buys Apono, a just-in-time access-governance platform for humans, machines, and AI agents (June 15). It extends 1Password from securing credentials to governing what every identity can reach, and for how long. Terms undisclosed.

Funding

Factorial Raises $150M at $2.5B

Barcelona's HR platform (Rails backend, 200+ product engineers) closes a $150M Series D led by General Catalyst, with up to $540M more through GC's Customer Value Fund (June 3). 16,000 businesses across 90 countries, ~2,600 employees, one of Europe's most valuable AI scale-ups.

Press

Clio Crosses $500M ARR

The legal practice platform and longtime Rails shop hits $500M in annual recurring revenue, up from $400M six months prior, serving legal professionals in 130+ countries. CEO Jack Newton frames it as joining "a rare class of profitable, accelerating AI platforms." Follows the $1B vLex acquisition and a $5B valuation.

Hiring

Fresh Ruby roles on the board, every listing re-verified this week: Gusto (Staff, Payments/Risk), Superconductor (Principal Rails), Koah Labs (Backend, Product, Platform), Omada Health, CompanyCam, plus open roles at Thatch, Persona, Chime, Patch, Reset, and Finta.

Browse all jobs

Event

RubyConf Austria Draws the Legends to Vienna

Dave Thomas opens with "Start Writing Ruby." Chad Fowler answers with "This is What We've Been Training For." One panel seats Fowler, José Valim, Obie Fernandez, and Armin Ronacher on the same stage.

22 talks over three days: Bozhidar Batsov asks "RuboCop 2.0: Where do we go now?", Charles Nutter runs a JRuby workshop, Marco Roth delivers "Herb & ReActionView: Mid-2026 Progress Update," and Carmine Paolino argues "Ruby Is the Best Language for Building AI Web Apps," the same case he made in Sofia two weeks earlier.

May 29–31, 2026 · Vienna, Austria

See the full lineup

Event

Balkan Ruby 2026 in Sofia

May 15–16, 2026

12 talks heavy on AI and Rails internals: Jean Boussier on multiprocessing as the most efficient way to serve Rails apps, Marco Roth on HTML-aware ERB, Vladimir Dementyev (Evil Martians) with "Drop your app/services!", and a PostgreSQL-to-SQLite migration story from production.

See the lineup

Event

Brighton Ruby Returns June 25

June 25, 2026

The long-running single-day UK conference returns with 11 talks: Rachael Wright-Munn's "Your First Open-Source Contribution," David Paluy's "LLM Telemetry as a First-Class Rails Concern" (the same talk that ran at Blue Ridge — LLM telemetry is having a moment), and Brooke Kuhlmann's Hanami + htmx app for e-ink devices.

See the lineup

Release

Shopify Summer '26: Horizon Themes, AI Blocks

May 2026

Rails Foundation Core member ships 150+ changes: the Horizon theme system with 10 free themes and AI block generation via Shopify Magic, up to 50% faster cart and checkout, a ground-up POS v10, Sidekick answering plain-English questions over ShopifyQL, and Payments in 16 new countries.

Press

Persona Clears FedRAMP Moderate

The SF identity unicorn ($2B valuation, Rails backend) earns FedRAMP Moderate Authorization as the only identity-verification provider in the FedRAMP 20x Phase 2 pilot. Federal agencies can now deploy Persona directly via the FedRAMP Marketplace and Carahsoft.

Funding

Great Question Raises $13M Series A

The Bay Area UX research platform (YC W21, Rails + React) raises from Inovia Capital to expand its AI-driven research tools. Customers include ServiceNow, Brex, Canva, and Asana.

AI + Ruby

Natural: Agentic Payments, Built on Rails

The SF startup building payment infrastructure for AI agents (wallets, pay, request, and credit across banking and stablecoins) runs Ruby on Rails under the hood. Out of stealth with a $9.8M seed, and currently hiring 15 engineering roles.

Press

RubyGems Repels a Supply-Chain Attack

Thousands of attacker-controlled accounts flooded the registry with tens of thousands of malicious packages (May 11). RubyGems suspended new signups, yanked 500+ packages, shipped WAF and rate-limiting fixes with Fastly, and reopened registrations within five days. The week the Ruby Alliance launched, its reason to exist made the case in production.

Acquisition

Toptal Acquires Adeva

The Rails-built talent network absorbs Adeva, a global IT talent network of vetted developers, architects, and tech professionals (May 26). CEO Taso Du Val frames it as deepening Toptal's expertise, scale, and delivery capacity. Terms undisclosed.

Hidden Ruby

Handshake AI: $1.1B Run Rate on Rails

The career network's AI data-labeling arm reached ~$1.1B in annualized gross revenue, up 349% YoY, serving OpenAI and other frontier labs (reported April 2026). The platform underneath: a Rails monolith (Puma, Sidekiq) decomposing into Rails Engines.

Earnings

GitLab: $264M Quarter, Agentic Tailwinds

Rails Foundation Core member reports Q1 FY2027 revenue of $264.2M (+23%), 14% non-GAAP operating margin, $149M operating cash flow, and 117% net retention. CEO Bill Staples: "The agentic era is creating structural tailwinds for GitLab."

Earnings

Doximity: $645M Year, 800K Prescribers

SF-based Rails Foundation Core member closes FY2026 with $644.9M revenue (+13%) and $317.5M free cash flow (+19%). A record 800K+ active prescribers use its workflow tools; nearly half already use its clinical AI, with prompts per user nearly doubling from January to April.

Release

Checkr Launches Profiles: Identity That Travels

SF background-check platform ($2.2B valuation, Rails) ships portable verified identity: identity verification, background checks, and credential validation in a shareable profile that individuals own. Built against AI-era fraud; per Checkr's research, 62% of managers believe people now fake identity better than organizations detect it.

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