The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2020–2026
Raycast bets Glaze makes personal, vibe-coded Mac apps the next app economy
Raycast's bet: most software becomes one-prompt, personal desktop apps, so it builds Glaze as the creation and distribution layer before app-store rules settle.
Raycast
What the business is
Raycast makes a keyboard-first Mac launcher with a community extension store; Glaze is its new product that turns plain-language prompts into native Mac desktop apps that launch, run offline and can be shared through a public store.
Starting capital：About $47.7M total: $17.7M across two earlier Accel-led rounds, then a $30M Series B led by Atomico announced 2024-09-25
How it started
Thomas Paul Mann and Petr Nikolaev founded Raycast in London in 2020 after leaving Meta, to solve their own context-switching problem as developers. The product grew from a Mac launcher into a platform of 20,000+ developer-built extensions, and the company raised a $30M Series B led by Atomico in September 2024 to expand to Windows and iOS.
What happened
In March 2026 Raycast launched Glaze in private beta; The Verge previewed it on 2026-03-04 as an all-in-one vibe-coding platform where a single prompt builds a native Mac app, with Claude Code and OpenAI Codex as the primary models and Apple Liquid Glass design defaults. Mann framed it as 'our take on personal computing', called the moment software's 'iTunes moment', and said Raycast was 'taking on the App Store on Mac and Windows'. Glaze is deeply integrated with the Raycast launcher, which orchestrates the apps users build; plans included a free tier plus $20–30 usage tiers. In late June 2026 Raycast opened Glaze to everyone with a public app store, saying early users had built thousands of apps in a few weeks.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
Raycast is the London startup behind a keyboard-first Mac launcher that grew out of its founders' own developer frustration. Founded in 2020 by ex-Meta engineers Thomas Paul Mann and Petr Nikolaev, it raised a $30M Series B led by Atomico in September 2024 — adding to $17.7M in earlier Accel-led rounds — on claims of hundreds of thousands of daily users and more than 20,000 extension developers.
Glaze is Raycast's bet on what comes after the launcher: describe an app and it builds a native Mac app in one go, using Claude Code and OpenAI Codex under the hood, Apple Liquid Glass design defaults, and a visual editor for tweaks. Apps live in the dock, launch instantly and work offline, and can be published to a shared Glaze store. Co-founder Thomas Paul Mann calls it 'our take on personal computing' and software's 'iTunes moment', saying Raycast is 'taking on the App Store on Mac and Windows'.
The wager is that software is becoming personal — built by the people who use it — so the scarce layer is not the store's curation but the creation-and-sharing pipeline around it. In private beta from March 2026 users built thousands of apps within weeks, including teams at Cursor, Linear and Vercel. On 2026-07-03 Glaze was #1 on Product Hunt's daily board with 544 upvotes as Raycast opened it to everyone with a public store; pricing plans of a free tier plus roughly $20–30 usage tiers were still being settled.
What has to be true
- Raycast's 20,000+ extension developers had already proven demand for small, shareable tools on its platform.
- Prompt-to-app removes the knowledge gate — no terminal, deployment or maintenance — widening makers far beyond developers.
- Owning creation plus distribution positions Raycast against app-store gatekeepers while the ecosystem is still unformed.
- Native desktop apps that follow Apple Liquid Glass rules feel like real software, not web wrappers.
- Existing Raycast distribution gives Glaze a launch audience and a built-in orchestration role rivals lack.
What can be applied
When a platform shift turns users into makers, win the creation layer — prompt to app, sharing, discovery — before the old app store defines the rules.
Aftermath
As of early July 2026 Glaze is live and public: it topped Product Hunt's daily board on 2026-07-03 with 544 upvotes, the public app store is open, and Raycast says its own support, sales and product teams run internal tools built on Glaze. The company has disclosed no revenue or usage figures for the product, plans tiers around free plus $20–30 per month, and says Windows and mobile versions are intended later; Mann acknowledges the open questions — who is responsible for shared apps, whether they can be sold, and who fixes them — are still being answered.
Sources
- Raycast's Glaze is an all-in-one vibe coding app platform
- Raycast raises $30M to bring its Mac productivity app to Windows and iOS
- Product Hunt Daily | 2026-07-04
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