Raycast

Overview

Raycast is a Berlin and London based productivity company founded by Thomas Paul Mann (CEO) and Petr Nikolaev (CTO), both former Facebook engineers. The company builds tools that help professionals work faster on their Mac (and now Windows). Their flagship product, the Raycast launcher, replaced Spotlight for hundreds of thousands of power users with features like clipboard history, window management, snippets, AI chat, and a community extension store with thousands of integrations. Raycast has raised over $30 million in venture capital including a $15 million Series A led by Accel and a $15 million extension round from Thrive Capital. The company is known for exceptional design craft and developer experience. Their extension ecosystem has thousands of community built integrations covering tools like GitHub, Linear, Notion, Jira, Figma, and more. In March 2026, Raycast launched Glaze, a new product that lets anyone create desktop apps by chatting with AI. Glaze represents Raycast's expansion from a productivity launcher into a platform for creating personalized software.

What makes them different

Raycast stands apart through its obsessive focus on design quality and native Mac performance. While other launcher tools feel utilitarian, Raycast apps feel like premium Apple software. This design DNA carries over into Glaze, where AI generated desktop apps look polished by default. The company has built significant distribution through the Raycast launcher. Hundreds of thousands of professionals already use Raycast daily, giving Glaze a built in audience of power users who care about software quality. The Raycast extension store model (community built, centrally distributed) is being replicated in Glaze with public and private app stores. Compared to other AI app builders that focus on web or mobile, Raycast with Glaze is the only major player building for desktop. Desktop apps can access the file system, run background processes, integrate with OS level features, and work offline, which are capabilities that web apps fundamentally lack.

Their tools

Glaze

raycast

coding

Create real desktop apps in minutes by chatting with AI. Local first, OS integrated, and beautiful by default. Currently in private beta (waitlist).

FreeView details →

Subscription plans

Links