LinearB, a startup helping engineering leaders streamline the workflow of their development teams, announced today that it has raised a $50 million Series B round led by Tribe Capital. New investor Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors Battery Ventures and 83North, also participated in this round, bringing the company’s total funding to $71 million.
The company says it managed to grow its user base from 1,500 development teams in 2021 to more than 5,000 today. It currently counts Bumble, BigID, Cloudinary, Unbabel, and Drata among its users.
One of the biggest promises of LinearB is that it goes beyond giving engineering managers access to more dashboards on developer efficiency. Instead, LinearB also wants to give you more information on how you can streamline your development workflow. It does this by integrating with a wide variety of existing DevOps tools to aggregate data about how teams are performing. Track metrics like cycle time, deployment frequency, mean restore time when things go off the rails, and failure rates change.
Image credits: LinearB
That data is at the core of what LinearB does and provides something akin to a baseline for developer productivity at a given company. But from there, users can also drill down to see where there are bottlenecks in their workflows or which team members may have too much on their plate right now.
In addition, LinearB also helps teams set their own goals so they can track their own progress, and it also helps them automate routine tasks like creating Jira tickets (because while that’s often the core of what it does a development team, no one likes to manage Jira Entries).
This focus on providing value for everyone, from the VP of engineering to the individual developer, is also a core tenet of the service, LinearB CEO and co-founder Ori Keren told me. Both he and his co-founder, Dan Lines, previously worked as VPs of R&D and engineering, and that was the user profile they had in mind when they started developing the service.
Keren tells me that they had some initial success with that, but decided that to really deliver the most value to their customers, they needed to change course. “Our true philosophy is that improvement has to come from the bottom up,” he said. “You have to have developers using that tool, you have to have team leaders, front-line managers. Very quickly, we identified that if we want to be a successful company, I wouldn’t say we turned a corner, but we quickly adjusted and said, when you come on board with the tool, you have to have something for every person in the engineering organization: the developers, the team leaders and also for engineering managers.”
That’s something the team learned in early 2020, and with the COVID pandemic at the time, many companies saw the need to ramp up their own projects to speed up their development processes. And while developers may not care too much about tracking the cost of their projects and instead the cycle time, they are both based on the same data.
The company says that its users are seeing deployment speeds increase by 64% during the first 120 days of using the project. “We’re not just building a tool that helps development teams, we’re building a community of engineering leaders who want to improve the way software development happens,” said LinearB COO and co-founder Dan Lines.
The company plans to use the new funding to expand through its own development teams, but also to expand its marketing efforts. In terms of product, the team is doubling down on its workflow optimization tools, Keren said. “We’re going to invest a lot in optimizing the developer workflow,” she said. “We believe that developer productivity, if you want to be good at it, you have to help developers – these are the people who are doing the work.”