How Graphite turned an internal side project into a $20 million Series A – TechCrunch

Graphite’s founders came from Facebook, Airbnb, and Square, three companies where they had access to sophisticated code review tools. When they started Graphite, originally as a mobile development tools company, they missed the tools they had in big companies and started building one to use internally.

They soon realized that the tool they had built for themselves gave developers access to a set of features previously reserved for people working in larger, more sophisticated companies. Eventually, they decided to focus their startup exclusively on this tool, explained company co-founder Merrill Lutsky.

“We actually built the first version of Graphite as an in-house tool just over a year ago. We had all missed the code review workflows we had at some of our previous companies. So we built the first version of the Graphite command line tool and dashboard as a tool that we can use internally,” he explained.

They started sharing the tool they were working on and were pleasantly surprised by the reaction. “The response to what became Graphite was so enthusiastic and compelling that we started to think maybe we should work on that instead.”

Before departing from their original idea, however, they set some parameters. If they could convince 20 engineers to download Graphite before the end of August, they would complete the transition. They ended up with 40 enthusiastic users, who gave them feedback, and last September they decided to go all out with the code review product.

Graphite Code Review Dashboard. Picture credits: Graphite

What they created is an open source command line interface and dashboard to streamline code review. Normally, code review is a linear process. You build part of the program, validate it and wait for the review. They wanted to change that to make it simultaneous, allowing you to continue your work, even while that original piece is being reviewed, a process that’s much more efficient.

“The idea with Graphite is that I make a change, and then while I’m looking for someone to review, I just keep making changes on top of that, creating this queue of things to do,” explained the company’s co-founder, Tomas Reimers. .

They are now a small team of six including the three founders, but hope to grow to 15-20 by the end of the year. Lutsky says he spends a lot of his time these days hiring engineers to join the company.

As they transition to working with recruitment agencies to recruit candidates, they focus on selecting a diverse pool of candidates early in the process. “As we start to hire more quickly, we’re actually talking to recruitment agencies about working with them and asking them to make sure they’re catering to candidates from different backgrounds,” he said. declared.

The new approach resonated with developers and today they’ve grown to over 2,500 users participating in the company’s Slack community, so it looks like they made the right decision. Lutsky says investors who had donated seed money for the idea, including lead investor Hunter Walk at Homebrew, were supportive of the management change.

Additionally, the company announced today that it has raised a $20 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz with Peter Levine taking over the investment.