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Pinpoint releases dashboard to bring visibility to software engineering operations
As companies look for better ways to understand how different departments work at a granular level, engineering has traditionally been a black box of siloed data. Pinpoint, an Austin-based startup, has been working on a platform to bring this information into a single view, and today it released a dashboard to help companies understand what’s happening across software engineering from an operational perspective.
Jeff Haynie, co-founder and CEO at Pinpoint says the company’s mission for the last two years has been giving greater visibility into the engineering department, something he says is even more important in the current context with workers spread out at home.
“Companies give engineering a bunch of money, and they build a bunch of amazing things, but in the end, it is just a black box, and we really don’t know what happens,” Haynie said. He says his company has been working to take all of the data to try and contextualize it, bring it together and correlate that information.
Today, they are introducing a dashboard that takes what they’ve been building and pulls it together into a single view, which is 100% self-serve. Prior to this, you needed a bunch of hand-holding from Pinpoint personnel to get it up and running, but today you can download the product and sign into your various services such as your git repository, your CI/CD software, your IDE and so forth.
It also provides a way for engineering personnel to communicate with one another without leaving the tool.
Pinpoint software engineering dashboard. Image Credit: Pinpoint
“Obviously, we will handhold and help people as they need it, and we have an enterprise version of the product with a higher level of SLA, and we have a customer success team to do that, but we’ve really focused this new release on purely self service,” Haynie said.
What’s more, while there is a free version already for teams under 10 people that’s free forever, with the release of today’s product, the company is offering unlimited access to the dashboard for free for three months.
Haynie says they’re like any startup right now, but having experience with several other startups and having lived through 9/11, the dot-com crash, 2008 and so forth, he knows how to hunker down and preserve cash. At the same time, he says they are seeing a lot of in-bound interest in the product, and they wanted to come up with a creative way to help customers through this crisis, while putting the product out there for people to use.
“We’re like any other startup or any other business frankly at this point: we’re nervous and scared. How do you survive this [and how long will it last]? The other side of it is that we’re rushing to take advantage of this inbound interest that we’re getting and trying to sort of seize the opportunity and try to be creative about how we help them.”
The startup hopes that, if companies find the product useful, after three months they won’t mind paying for the full version. For now, it’s just putting it out there for free and seeing what happens with it — just another startup trying to find a way through this crisis.
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Datree announces $8M Series A as it joins Y Combinator
Datree, the early-stage startup building a DevOps policy engine on GitHub, announced an $8 million Series A today. It also announced it has joined the Y Combinator Winter 20 cohort.
Blumberg and TLV Partners led the round with participation from Y Combinator . The company has now raised $11 million with the $3 million seed round announced in 2018.
Since that seed round, company co-founder and CEO Shimon Tolts says that the company learned that while scanning code for issues was something DevOps teams found useful, they wanted help defining the rules. So Datree has created a series of rules packages you can run against the code to find any gaps or issues.
“We offer development best practices, coding standards and security and compliance policies. What happens today is that, as you connect to Datree, we connect to your source code and scan the entire code base, and we recommend development best practices based on your technology stack,” Tolts explained.
He says that they build these rules packages based on the company’s own expertise, as well as getting help from the community, and in some cases partnering with experts. For its Docker security package, it teamed up with Aqua Security.
The focus remains on applying these rules in GitHub where developers are working. Before committing the code, they can run the appropriate rules packages against it to ensure they are in compliance with best practices.
Datree rules packages. Screenshot: Datree
Tolts says they began looking at Y Combinator after the seed round because they wanted more guidance on building out the business. “We knew that Y Combinator could really help us because our product is relevant to 95 percent of all YC companies, and the program has helped us go and work on six figure deals with more mature YC companies,” he said.
Datree is working directly with Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel, and he says being part of the Winter 20 cohort has helped him refine his go-to-market motion. He admits he is not a typical YC company having been around since 2017 with an existing product and 12 employees, but he thinks it will help propel the company in the long run.
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Where top VCs are investing in open source and dev tools (Part 2 of 2)
In part two of a survey that asks top VCs about exciting opportunities in open source and dev tools, we dig into responses from 10 leading open-source-focused investors at firms that span early to growth stage across software-specific firms, corporate venture arms and prominent generalist firms.
In the conclusion to our survey, we’ll hear from:
- Gaurav Gupta, Lightspeed Venture Partners
- Julia Schottenstein, New Enterprise Associates (NEA)
- Peter Sonsini, New Enterprise Associates (NEA)
- Salil Deshpande, Uncorrelated Ventures
- Ethan Kurzweil, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Sakib Dadi, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Jenny Gao, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Mike Droesch, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Lonne Jaffe, Insight Venture Partners
- Jai Das, Sapphire Ventures
These responses have been edited for clarity and length.
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Where top VCs are investing in open source and dev tools (Part 1 of 2)
The once-polarizing world of open-source software has recently become one of the hotter destinations for VCs.
As the popularity of open source increases among organizations and developers, startups in the space have reached new heights and monstrous valuations.
Over the past several years, we’ve seen surging open-source companies like Databricks reach unicorn status, as well as VCs who cashed out behind a serious number of exits involving open-source and dev tool companies, deals like IBM’s Red Hat acquisition or Elastic’s late-2018 IPO. Last year, the exit spree continued with transactions like F5 Networks’ acquisition of NGINX and a number of high-profile acquisitions from mainstays like Microsoft and GitHub.
Similarly, venture investment in new startups in the space has continued to swell. More investors are taking shots at finding the next big payout, with annual invested capital in open-source and dev tool startups increasing at a roughly 10% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) over the last five years, according to data from Crunchbase. Furthermore, attractive returns in the space seem to be adding more fuel to the fire, as open-source and dev tool startups saw more than $2 billion invested in the space in 2019 alone, per Crunchbase data.
As we close out another strong year for innovation and venture investing in the sector, we asked 18 of the top open-source-focused VCs who work at firms spanning early to growth stages to share what’s exciting them most and where they see opportunities. For purposes of length and clarity, responses have been edited and split (in no particular order) into part one and part two of this survey. In part one of our survey, we hear from:
- Vas Natarajan, Accel
- Stephanie Zhan, Sequoia Capital
- Tomasz Tunguz, Redpoint Ventures
- Deepak Jeevankumar, Dell Technologies Capital
- Anna Khan, CRV
- Peter Levine, Andreessen Horowitz
- Ilya Kirnos, SignalFire
- S. Somasegar, Madrona Ventures
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Harness launches Continuous Insights to measure software team performance
Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder at Harness, has always been frustrated by the lack of tools to measure software development team performance. Harness is a tool that provides Continuous Delivery as a Service, and its latest offering, Continuous Insights, lets managers know exactly how their teams are performing.
Bansal says a traditional management maxim says that if you can’t measure a process, you can’t fix it, and Continuous Insights is designed to provide a way to measure engineering effectiveness. “People want to understand how good their software delivery processes are, and where they are tracking right now, and that’s what this product, Continuous Insights, is about,” Bansal explained.
He says that it is the first product in the market to provide this view of performance without pulling weeks or months of data. “How do you get data around what your current performance is like, and how fast you deliver software, or where the bottlenecks are, and that’s where there are currently a lot of visibility gaps,” he said. He adds, “Continuous Insights makes it extremely easy for engineering teams to clearly measure and track software delivery performance with customizable, dashboards.”
Harness measures four key metrics as defined by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) in their book Accelerate. These include deployment frequency, lead time, mean-time-to-recovery and failure change rate. “Any organization that can do a better job with these would would really out-innovate their peers and competitors,” he said. Conversely, companies doing badly on these four metrics are more likely to fall behind in the market.
Image: Harness
By measuring these four areas, it not only provides a way to track performance, he sees it as a way to gamify these metrics where each team tries to outdo one another around efficiency. While you would think that engineering would be the most data-driven organization, he says that up until now it has lacked the tooling. He hopes that Harness users will be able to bring that kind of rigor to engineering.
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GitLab hauls in $268M Series E on 2.75B valuation
GitLab is a company that doesn’t pull any punches or try to be coy. It actually has had a page on its website for some time stating it intends to go public on November 18, 2020. You don’t see that level of transparency from late-stage startups all that often. Today, the company announced a huge $268 million Series E on a tidy $2.75 billion valuation.
Investors include Adage Capital Management, Alkeon Capital, Altimeter Capital, Capital Group, Coatue Management, D1 Capital Partners, Franklin Templeton, Light Street Capital, Tiger Management Corp. and Two Sigma Investments.
The company seems to be primed and ready for that eventual IPO. Last year, GitLab co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij said that his CFO Paul Machle told him he wanted to begin planning to go public, and he would need two years in advance to prepare the company. As Sijbrandij tells it, he told him to pick a date.
“He said, I’ll pick the 16th of November because that’s the birthday of my twins. It’s also the last week before Thanksgiving, and after Thanksgiving, the stock market is less active, so that’s a good time to go out,” Sijbrandij told TechCrunch.
He said that he considered it a done deal and put the date on the GitLab Strategy page, a page that outlines the company’s plans for everything it intends to do. It turned out that he was a bit too quick on the draw. Machle had checked the date in the interim and realized that it was a Monday, which is not traditionally a great day to go out, so they decided to do it two days later. Now the target date is officially November 18, 2020.
GitLab has the date it’s planning to go public listed on its Strategy page.
As for that $268 million, it gives the company considerable runway ahead of that planned event, but Sijbrandij says it also gives him flexibility in how to take the company public. “One other consideration is that there are two options to go public. You can do an IPO or direct listing. We wanted to preserve the optionality of doing a direct listing next year. So if we do a direct listing, we’re not going to raise any additional money, and we wanted to make sure that this is enough in that case,” he explained.
Sijbrandij says that the company made a deliberate decision to be transparent early on. Being based on an open-source project, it’s sometimes tricky to make that transition to a commercial company, and sometimes that has a negative impact on the community and the number of contributions. Transparency was a way to combat that, and it seems to be working.
He reports that the community contributes 200 improvements to the GitLab open-source product every month, and that’s double the amount of just a year ago, so the community is still highly active in spite of the parent company’s commercial success.
It did not escape his notice that Microsoft acquired GitHub last year for $7.5 billion. It’s worth noting that GitLab is a similar kind of company that helps developers manage and distribute code in a DevOps environment. He claims in spite of that eye-popping number, his goal is to remain an independent company and take this through to the next phase.
“Our ambition is to stay an independent company. And that’s why we put out the ambition early to become a listed company. That’s not totally in our control as the majority of the company is owned by investors, but as long as we’re more positive about the future than the people around us, I think we can we have a shot at not getting acquired,” he said.
The company was founded in 2014 and was a member of Y Combinator in 2015. It has been on a steady growth trajectory ever since, hauling in more than $426 million. The last round before today’s announcement was a $100 million Series D last September.
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Dark emerges from stealth with unique ‘deployless’ software model
Dark has been keeping its startup in the dark for the last couple of years while it has built a unique kind of platform it calls “deployless” software development. If you build your application in Dark’s language inside of Dark’s editor, the reward is you can deploy it automatically on Dark’s infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform without worrying about all of the typical underlying deployment tasks.
The company emerged from stealth today and announced $3.5 million in seed funding, which it actually received back in 2017. The founders have spent the last couple of years building this rather complex platform.
Ellen Chisa, CEO and co-founder at the company, admits that the Dark approach requires learning to use her company’s toolset, but she says the trade-off is worth it because everything has been carefully designed to work in tandem.
“I think the biggest downside of Dark is definitely that you’re learning a new language, and using a different editor when you might be used to something else, but we think you get a lot more benefit out of having the three parts working together,” she told TechCrunch.
She added, “In Dark, you’re getting the benefit of your editor knowing how the language works. So you get really great autocomplete, and your infrastructure is set up for you as soon as you’ve written any code because we know exactly what is required.”
It’s certainly an intriguing proposition, but Chisa acknowledges that it will require evangelizing the methodology to programmers, who may be used to employing a particular set of tools to write their programs. She said the biggest selling point is that it removes so much of the complexity around deployment by bringing an integrated level of automation to the process.
She says there are three main benefits to Dark’s approach. In addition to providing automated infrastructure, which is itself a major plus, developers using Dark don’t have to worry about a deployment pipeline. “As soon as you write any piece of backend code in Dark, it is already hosted for you,” she explained. The last piece is that tracing is built right in as you code. “Because you’re using our infrastructure, you have traces available in your editor as soon as you’ve written any code,” she said.
Chisa’s co-founder and company CTO is Paul Biggar, who knows a thing or two about deployment, having helped found CircleCI, the CI/CD pioneering company.
As for that $3.5 million seed round, it was led by Cervin Ventures, with participation from Boldstart, Data Collective, Harrison Metal, Xfactor (Erica Brescia), Backstage, Nextview, Promus, Correlation, 122 West and Yubari.
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Serverless, Inc. expands free Framework to include monitoring and security
Serverless development has largely been a lonely pursuit until recently, but Serverless, Inc. has been offering a free framework for intrepid programmers since 2015. At first, that involved development, deployment and testing, but today the company announced it is expanding into monitoring and security to make it an end-to-end tool — and it’s available for free.
Serverless computing isn’t actually server-free, but it’s a form of computing that provides a way to use only the computing resources you need to carry out a given function — and no more. When the process is complete, the resources effectively go away. That has the potential to be more cost-effective than having a server that’s always on, regardless of whether you’re using it or not. That requires a new way of thinking about how developers write code.
While serverless offers a compelling value proposition, up until Serverless, Inc. came along with some developer tooling, early adherents were pretty much stuck building their own tooling to develop, deploy and test their programs. Today’s announcement expands the earlier free Serverless, Inc. Framework to provide a more complete set of serverless developer tools.
Company founder and CEO Austen Collins says that he has been thinking a lot about what developers need to develop and deploy serverless programs, and talking to customers. He says that they really craved a more integrated approach to serverless development than has been available until now.
“What we’re trying to do is build this perfectly integrated solution for developers and developer teams because we want to enable them to innovate as much as possible and be as autonomous as possible,” Collins told TechCrunch. He says at the same time, he recognizes that operations need to connect to other tools, and the Serverless Framework provides hooks into other systems, as well.
The new tooling includes an integrated environment, so that once you deploy, you can simply click an error or security event and drill down to a dashboard for more information about the issue. You can click for further detail to see the exact spot in the code where the issue occurred, which should make it easier to resolve more quickly.
While no tool is 100% comprehensive, and most large organizations, and even individual developers, will have a set of tools they prefer to use, this is an attempt to build a one-stop solution for serverless developers for the first time. That in itself is significant, as serverless moves beyond early adopters and begins to become more of a mainstream kind of programming and deployment option. People starting now probably won’t want to cobble together their own toolkits, and the Serverless, Inc. Framerwork gives them a good starting point.
Serverless, Inc. was founded by Collins in 2015 out of a need for serverless computing tooling. He has raised more than $13.5 million since inception.
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VCs bet $12M on Troops, a Slackbot for sales teams
Slack wants to be the new operating system for teams, something it has made clear on more than one occasion, including in its recent S-1 filing. To accomplish that goal, it put together an in-house $80 million venture fund in 2015 to invest in third-party developers building on top of its platform.
Weeks ahead of its direct listing on The New York Stock Exchange, it continues to put that money to work.
Troops is the latest to land additional capital from the enterprise giant. The New York-based startup helps sales teams communicate with a customer relationship management tool plugged directly into Slack. In short, it automates routine sales management activities and creates visibility into important deals through integrations with employee emails and Salesforce.
Troops founder and chief executive officer Dan Reich, who previously co-founded TULA Skincare, told TechCrunch he opted to build a Slackbot rather than create an independent platform because Slack is a rocket ship and he wanted a seat on board: “When you think about where Slack will go in the future, it’s obvious to us that companies all over the world will be using it,” he said.
Troops has raised $12 million in Series B funding in a round led by Aspect Ventures, with participation from the Slack Fund, First Round Capital, Felicis Ventures, Susa Ventures, Chicago Ventures, Hone Capital, InVision founder Clark Valberg and others. The round brings Troops’ total raised to $22 million.
Launched in 2015 by New York tech veterans Reich, Scott Britton and Greg Ratner, the trio weren’t initially sure of Slack’s growth trajectory. It wasn’t until Slack confirmed its intent to support the developer ecosystem with a suite of developer tools and a fund that the team focused its efforts on building a Slackbot.
“People sometimes thought of us, at least in the early days, as a little bit crazy,” Reich said. “But now Slack is the fastest-growing SaaS company ever.”
“We think the biggest opportunity in the [enterprise SaaS] category is going to be tools oriented around the customer-facing employee (CRM), and that’s where we are innovating,” he added.
Troops’ tools are helpful for any customer-facing team, Reich explains. Envoy, WeWork, HubSpot and a few hundred others are monthly paying subscribers of the tool, using it to interact with their CRM in a messaging interface and to receive notifications when a deal has closed. Troops integrates with Salesforce, so employees can use it to search records, schedule automatic reports and celebrate company wins.
Slack, in partnership with a number of venture capital funds, including Accel, Kleiner Perkins and Index, has also deployed capital to a number of other startups, like Lattice, Drafted and Loom.
With Slack’s direct listing afoot, the Troops team is counting on the imminent and long-term growth of the company’s platform.
“We think it’s still early days,” Reich said. “In the future, we see every company using something like Troops to manage their day-to-day.”
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Talk key takeaways from Google Cloud Next with TechCrunch writers
Google’s Cloud Next conference is taking over the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week and TechCrunch is on the scene covering all the latest announcements.
Google Cloud already powers some of the world’s premier companies and startups, and now it’s poised to put even more pressure on cloud competitors like AWS with its newly-released products and services. TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois will be on the ground at the event, and Ron Miller will be covering from afar. Thursday at 10:00 am PT, Frederic and Ron will be sharing what they saw and what it all means with Extra Crunch members on a conference call.
Tune in to dig into what happened onstage and off and ask Frederic and Ron any and all things cloud or enterprise.
To listen to this and all future conference calls, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.
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