>>ptrtho+(OP)
Congratulations! Our own journey was fairly similar: Unsatisfied with existing tooling, created open-source project with blessing of employer (it helped that in <2 weeks we built a prototype that was already better than what $big_consultancy had spent months building), adopted by a few companies worldwide, eventually left employer and started an open-core business around it (albeit without VC money, and probably a much smaller market —pixel-based GUI testing for set-top-boxes—, and there's a hardware component to our product). Going strong since 2012 (open source project) / 2014 (business). I don't know that my advice will be relevant given the different market / VC approach, but feel free to reach out if you want to chat.