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

LinearB, a platform designed to bring greater efficiency to engineering teams through automation, analytics and project management smarts, has raised $50 million in a series B round of funding.

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

“Before 2020, developer teams were together in the office — engineering managers relied on proximity to keep track of what developers were working on and developers relied on proximity for collaboration and managing dependencies with one another,” said Ori Keren, CEO of LinearB. “After the move to remote work, managers lost visibility and developers started struggling with more noise in Slack, interruptions asking for status updates and unnecessary meetings. For developers, this resulted in idle time, bottlenecks, less time coding and more frustration. For managers, this resulted in fewer new features being built and higher turnover.”

How does LinearB address all this, exactly? Well, the platform helps software developers align their day-to-day work with business objectives, while managers can visualize “people effort,” real-time project statuses and all the 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 LinearB can also detect when an issue is out-of-date and automatically update the developer’s project management tool.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 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 bulk of which arrived via its series A round last March. And in the intervening months, the company said that it has seen a three-fold rise in the number of teams using its product, while the overall number of developers using the platform has risen by 700% to more than 100,000. Among the companies using its product include Drata, BigID, Cloudinary and Unbabel.

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

“LinearB helps developers spend more time coding, building and solving problems,” Keren said. “For organizations that rely on developers for innovation, increasing developer productivity is a top priority. Massive time, energy and budget is allocated to helping developers be more productive during their coding time.”

Indeed, there are no shortage of developer-focused tools to help them ship secure code more quickly — GitHub Copilot and Snyk to name just a couple. But while an average programmer may work eight hours a day or more, much of that time is not spent productively creating 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 spadework.

“The average developer spends only one to two hours 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 filled with repetitive, menial tasks that developers dislike. Unfortunately, the ecosystem of tools and the investment from organizations to make this part of the development process more productive is not nearly as mature.

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