LinearB secures $16 million in Series A funding

LinearB announced $16 million in Series A funding to fundamentally change the way dev teams operate. The new investment was led by Battery Ventures, and includes existing investors 83North and Ariel Maislos, and new investor TechAviv Founder Partners. The investment brings LinearB’s total funding to $21 million.

Launched in 2019, LinearB offers a new approach to traditional software development project management and metrics. Software Delivery Intelligence helps dev teams continuously accelerate delivery by correlating development pipeline data from code, Git, projects and releases to provide visibility, context and workflow automation for every member of the team.

“Every part of the software development process is driven by data today, except the writing and creation of code—which is impeding productivity for developers,” said Dharmesh Thakker, a Battery general partner. “LinearB is helping dev teams fix bottlenecks across the entire development process so they can work better with fewer interruptions. We are excited to partner with the LinearB team as they work to improve developer productivity and workflow, as well as better align engineering and business leaders.”

“More than 1,100 dev teams adopted LinearB in the last six months alone. So it’s clear there’s demand for Software Delivery Intelligence,” said Gil Goren, Partner at 83North. “Ori and Dan have built a committed team and a passionate community of the best start-up engineering leaders in the world. We’re partnering with LinearB to take Software Delivery Intelligence into every dev team.”

1,500+ software development teams in total use LinearB including many hyper-growth start-ups and unicorns like Axonius, BigID, Unbabel, Appcues and Clubhouse.

“LinearB helps us analyze, triage and fix process problems. We get a full view of our engineering lifecycle we never had before,” said Zach Ozer, VP of Engineering at Clubhouse.” It’s been transformational for our dev team.”

Unlike traditional project management and metrics tools which are useful for executives but create more work for developers, Software Delivery Intelligence provides value to every member of the team:

• Visibility: Team-based metrics help CTOs and VPs of Engineering understand efficiency and quality, detect process bottlenecks, visualize team health, and ensure alignment between engineering work and business priorities.
   
• Context: Intelligent project board correlates code, Git logs, project data and releases to help dev team leads see accurate, real-time project updates, predict delivery delays, identify scope-creep and run efficient, fact-based meetings.
   
• Workflow: Configurable policies, alerts and commands eliminate manual tasks for developers through automation, deliver personal insights at the right time where they work and help enforce team guardrails.

The result is happier developers with more time to build, continuous team improvement and tighter alignment to business priorities which leads to accelerated delivery. Dev teams using LinearB SDI improve their time-to-value (Cycle Time) by 48 percent on average after 90 days.

“Metrics alone do not improve dev teams. This is the mistake first-generation engineering efficiency tools made. Software Delivery Intelligence takes visibility and turns it into insight and active improvement,” said Ori Keren, CEO of LinearB. “Helping engineering teams improve and scale is not about managing developers more strictly with top down control. It’s about empowering developers by giving them more context, less bureaucracy and more time to build.”

A driving factor in LinearB’s rapid growth is its focus on community and facilitating new thinking. Its fast-growing Dev Interrupted online community and podcast for progressive dev leaders facilitates open discussions and shared experiences around scaling teams, building culture and using Software Delivery Intelligence. LinearB co-founder Dan Lines, DZone’s 2020 Agile Person of the Year, leads these efforts.