GitPrime Lands $10.5 Million Investment To Make Engineers More Productive

Companies are always searching for ways to improve productivity. It’s this need that helped propel Slack, Atlassian, and other providers within this “Future of Work” segment to success or notoriety. But one solution doesn’t fit all, especially when it comes to engineers. They are more data-driven and mathematical than others in the workforce, so providing evidentiary support is critical to improving productivity.

This is an area where GitPrime believes it can provide the best service. The startup on Wednesday announced it raised $10.5 million which will help it continue to provide engineers with quantifiable reports based off of their code base. The idea is that by identifying events through this data, teams will have greater visibility in terms of what’s going on, versus constantly wondering who’s working on a particular area or why a change was recently pushed live or deprecated.

“When you hire a team to build a house, you can walk on-site and see the house slowly being built. It’s obvious when people are working and their work-product is self-evident,” remarked Ben Thompson, GitPrime’s co-founder and Chief Customer Officer. “That’s not true when you’re building software. On the surface, programming ‘work’ is just people typing on computers. In fact, it’s very difficult to tell the difference between incremental progress and chaos at a glance.”

The latest infusion of capital is thanks to new lead investor OpenView and existing investor Data Collective. As is typical for startups hitting their Series A milestone, the funding is earmarked for expansion of the product and team. To date, GitPrime has raised a total of $13 million in venture capital.

In today’s business climate, practically every company has at least a developer on-staff, likely either in the engineering or IT departments.  The bigger the company, the more developers, and the larger the code base, which makes managing time and effort that much more critical. When you’re a startup, having teams communicate with one another is easy — you’re a small group. But if you look at corporations like Disney and Cigna, which are GitPrime customers, then having a solution that provides clear optics over everything a developer might touch is essential.

“As teams scale beyond the ‘garage band’ size of 8 to 10 [people], we tend to lose our intuitive feel for how each member of the team is doing,” Travis Kimmel, GitPrime’s chief executive and other co-founder told me in an email. “The bigger the team, the worse this problem as leadership gets spread thinner and thinner. With a team of 500, it’s nearly impossible to track team health without some sort of data benchmark.”

Sure, you could have teams hold conversations within Slack, Google Hangouts Chat, Atlassian’s Stride, Cisco Spark, Microsoft Teams, or any of the countless intranet or chat services. But none are borne out of code culture — they aren’t attuned to the ways of the developer and how these teams interact with one another. GitPrime pulls in key events from multiple sources, including the code base, ticketing systems, and other existing tools engineers use, to produce reports on how the organization is doing and what should be improved.

“As engineering leaders, our mission is to keep the team on track and help each engineer reach their potential, yet even seemingly simple questions like ‘Who should I help today?’ or ‘Did everyone make progress yesterday?’ are surprisingly difficult to answer,” Kimmel declared.

With the new funding, GitPrime said that it’s going to look to beef up its offering around the enterprise, a space where many of its customers are in. Kimmel declined to specify what specifically the company had planned, but hinted that artificial intelligence would play a role in GitPrime’s roadmap. “The recent advances are just too compelling to ignore,” he said. “As additional data sources beyond version control come into the mix, we’re seeing more opportunities for this kind of tech. In the immediate future, we’re really focused on the needs of Enterprise and will have some great features to share in the coming months.”

It’s feasible that additional integration support may be in the pipe for the company, looking at the various systems that companies are currently using and whether there’s an opportunity to tap into them. After all, with access to more data, the better-informed teams will be, right? “We’re laser-focused on using data to help with software engineering performance management,” Kimmel indicated. “It’s a vast and completely unexplored space  Data-driven Marketing & Sales platforms continue to mature, even though those concepts are at this point a decade or more old. We believe one day every engineering team will use data as a key part of their success, and getting there is our central goal.”