Software delivery intelligence company LinearB lands $50 million to improve engineering efficiency

LinearB, a platform designed to make engineering teams more efficient through automation, analytics and intelligent project management, has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round.

The increase comes as companies across the industry spectrum have transitioned to a semi-permanent state of remote work, while the great boom in digital transformation has reinforced the notion that every company today is a software company.

“Before 2020, development teams were in the office together — technical managers relied on proximity to keep track of what developers were working on, and developers relied on proximity to collaborate and manage dependencies,” LinearB CEO Ori Keren told VentureBeat . “After moving to remote work, managers lost visibility and developers struggled with more noise in Slack, interruptions asking for status updates, and unnecessary meetings. For developers, this resulted in idle time, bottlenecks, less programming effort, and more frustration. For managers, this resulted in fewer new features being created and higher revenue.”

How exactly does LinearB go about all of this? Well, the platform helps software developers align their day-to-day work with business goals, while managers can visualize “staff deployment”, real-time project status and all important data in a single pane. LinearB can also detect when an issue is out of date and automatically update the developer’s project management tool.

LinearB can do all of this through pre-built integrations with GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Jira, Slack, Jenkins, CircleCI, and more.

The story so far

Founded in 2018, LinearB had previously raised around $20 million in funding, the majority of which came via its Series A round last March. And over the past few months, the company said the number of teams using its product has tripled, while the total number of developers using the platform has increased by 700% to over 100,000. Companies using his product include Drata, BigID, Cloudinary and Unbabel.

Other notable players in this space include Jellyfish, which recently closed a $71 million funding round, suggesting that the software delivery intelligence space is really starting to heat up.

“LinearB helps developers spend more time coding, building, and problem-solving,” Keren said. “For organizations that rely on developers for innovation, increasing developer productivity is a top priority. A lot of time, energy and budget is expended to help developers be more productive during their coding time.”

In fact, there’s no shortage of developer-focused tools to help you ship secure code faster—GitHub Copilot and Snyk, to name a few. But while an average programmer can work eight hours a day or more, much of that time is not spent productively building or shipping new code. And that ultimately gets to the heart of what LinearB is trying to do – it automates the (still important) non-coding prep work.

“The average developer only spends an hour or two a day writing code—the rest of their time is spent reading and reviewing code, updating issue trackers, sharing status updates, and attending meetings,” Keren said. “This non-coding work is full of repetitive, menial tasks that developers don’t like. Unfortunately, the ecosystem of tools and investments made by organizations to make this part of the development process more productive is far from mature.

LinearB’s Series B funding round was led by Tribe Capital with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Battery Ventures and 83North.