PullRequest has been on a whirlwind lately, but it’s the kind that any startup would likely welcome. The company was in Y Combinator last August just trying to learn the startup ropes. By December it had scored a $2.3 million seed round — and it’s keeping it going. Today the company announced an $8 million Series A led by seed investor Google Gradient Ventures, who also led the seed round.
Today’s investment includes from participation from other seed investors too including Y Combinator, Fika Ventures, Lynett Capital and Defy Partners. That brings the total raised to $10.3 million in just a few months.
What is warranting such positive investor attention? PullRequest is working to solve a big developer pain point. As development cycles speed up, the part of the process that tends to suffer is code quality assurance (QA). As company founder and CEO Lyal Avery told TechCrunch last August, it’s using on demand reviewers to solve the problem.
“We offer code review as a service. As developers push code, we have on-demand experts that review it [before it gets published]. This allows them to move forward without resources constraining the operation,” company founder Lyal Avery told TechCrunch.
When the company got the seed round in December, Avery said the goal is to begin to bring an element of automation and intelligence to the platform and he recently said that the company is continuing the move in that direction.
In the age of big data leaks, Avery points out that his platform not only finds bugs and issues in the code, it could help prevent data leaks like the ones we’ve seen lately from Under Armour and others (they are simply the flavor of the week). In fact, he claims they have found vulnerabilities that prevented such leaks recently (although he wouldn’t say who the client was for obvious reasons).
Anna Patterson, managing director at lead investor Gradient Ventures, sees a powerful combination in on-demand and code review. “PullRequest is working at the intersection of better code and the future of work – leveraging AI to make code reviews more accessible, so that enterprises, of all scales, can adopt this methodology,” she said in a statement.
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Code review and bug tracking remain a hot startup area as companies struggle to fit this kind of review into increasingly fast development cycles. Back in the day, it was easy to include QA in the development workflow because timeframes were so long. As the timeframes become more and more compressed, a company like PullRequest is filling in the gap — and investors are noticing.
