From climbing high-rise towers in Australia to building world-class developer tools, James Spoor's path to founding Octopipe has been anything but ordinary. With a global career spanning rope access, recruitment, and venture-backed AI startups, Spoor's journey reflects a relentless determination to solve hard problems and move fast—qualities now powering his latest creation: Octopipe.

A Relentless Path to Innovation

Spoor's early career began in the outdoors—first as an adventure instructor in northern England, then teaching environmental science in the UAE. In Thailand, he launched several import/export ventures before transitioning to rope access work in Australia, eventually running industrial jobs on skyscrapers and power stations. Later, he dabbled in recruiting before discovering his true passion: software engineering.

His transition to tech began with an internship in Switzerland. Within a year, he was a founding engineer at DeepCode, an AI code analysis company that was later acquired by Snyk. At Snyk, Spoor led the first integrations of DeepCode into Snyk's platform, launching key developer features like their command-line interface and pull request scanning tools.

"My job was to make AI useful for developers. I learned how to ship fast, ship smart, and solve for real-world pain," Spoor said.

From Engineer to Repeat Founder

In 2022, Spoor left Snyk to launch Anarchy, a developer-first platform accepted into Y Combinator. The startup initially tackled semantic code search and later pivoted to serve AI infrastructure needs. After stepping away from Anarchy, Spoor went on to found Speal, an AI-powered legal review tool for SaaS sales teams, leveraging rule-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to respond to redlines instantly.

Both startups were venture-backed, and while Spoor ultimately exited each, the lessons learned became foundational to what came next.

"Failing at my first two venture-backed companies was brutal," Spoor admits. "But it taught me lessons most people never get. I still believe. I still build."

The Birth of Octopipe

While serving as Head of Engineering at HockeyStack, Spoor encountered firsthand how fragile, slow, and unscalable most internal data pipelines really are. Even well-funded teams struggled with messy configurations, broken transformations, and painful deployments.

So, he built the solution: Octopipe.

"Octopipe is the fastest way to go from raw data to production pipelines. It's fully open-source, radically developer-friendly, and automates the transformation layer so your data can flow in minutes—not months."

Unlike traditional tools, Octopipe lets teams define their pipeline in a simple YAML DSL, then auto-generates and deploys artifacts across Airflow, Spark, Kafka, and more—no infra expertise required. Early users report time-to-value in under 15 minutes, far outpacing incumbents.

The Octopipe waitlist is now open at octopipe.com.

Looking Ahead

Spoor's vision is ambitious: to make Octopipe the default engine for AI-era data pipelines and reach $1M in ARR with an open-source-first strategy. With developer adoption already growing and a product that solves a real pain point, Octopipe may just live up to the bold claim.

"Engineers should focus on building, not fighting infrastructure or wrangling glue code between tools," Spoor said. "In the AI era, your stack should work for you—not the other way around. That's what Octopipe does."