Swarmia raises $8M Seed to help software development teams deal with data

Swarmia, a B2B SaaS company for software development teams dealing with data, has raised a 5.7 M Seed round and a previously unannounced 1M pre-seed round, taking its raise to 6.7M ($8M). The Seed round was led by Alven Capital and joined by Jigsaw VC, Irena Goldenberg, Alex Algard, Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, Jonathan Benhamou and Romain Huet. Lifeline Ventures, the sole investor in a previously unannounced 1M pre-seed round, also participated. The cash wil be used to scale to the US.

Founder Otto Hilska is a serial entrepreneur who started Flowdock (team collaboration product, acquired by Rally Software) and was Smartly.io's Chief Product Officer.

Hilska says many software development organizations could be much more successful if they had a better visibility to their work and a systematic approach for continuous improvement".

Swarmia integrates with development tools such as GitHub, Jira, Linear and various CI tools to create a holistic view to the engineering teams' inner workings."

Competitors include Pluralsight Flow (raised $192.5M) and CodeClimate Velocity ($15M).

However, Hilska says: We're the only product in the market that's actually used by developers themselves. We don't build features for stalking individual developers, but rather focus on how the team can improve. We've built the product together with our pilot customers (with shared Slack channels and daily iteration) to make sure that it actually scales with them. Every team is different, and our product adapts to these different ways of working by letting teams define their Working Agreements. That leads to much better data quality, since we actually understand how the teams work - while competitors are happy to plot any incorrect data. Our Slack bot also helps teams drive the behavioral change when teams choose to adopt a working agreement."

Thomas Cuvelier, Partner at Alven commented: Software is eating the world but software engineering, the largest cost center of the modern organization, is still a black box. Swarmia solves a considerable pain point by bringing visibility to engineering work and helping executives make the right business decisions based on data rather than anecdotal evidence. What Otto and his team have achieved so far is impressive and they're well on their way to drive better working habits for the world's 27m developers."