It's tricky to have a clear understanding of how software development teams are working and what can be done to improve.
Austin-based Pinpoint hopes to change that with the launch of its software and engineering data analytics platform and a $13.5 million Series A round of funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Seed investors Storm Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Slack Fund, Social Capital and Cherubic Ventures also got in on the round, which brings the startup's total funding to $16.5 million.
Pinpoint was founded a few years ago by CEO Jeff Haynie and CPO Nolan Wright. Before Pinpoint, the duo co-founded Appcelerator, which is perhaps best known for Titanium, an open-source app development platform that was acquired by Axway in 2016. Pinpoint has offices at the Domain in North Austin, along with offices in Raleigh, Silicon Valley and Guadalajara, Mexico.
“Software engineering is home to some of the most creative and technically astute minds in any company, but we’re behind in one really important way,” Haynie said in a news release. “Namely, being able to show our contribution to the business. With Pinpoint we said, what if we instrumented the activity in software source systems like Jira and GitHub, and combined that activity with data science to understand how people, teams and work are actually progressing? You get a true, data-driven view of engineering performance.”
Wright said Pinpoint was formed after he and Haynie recognized the difficulties in monitoring their own engineering teams across multiple development systems.
"Just about everyone has scars from some past attempt to build comprehensive KPIs or metrics," Wright wrote in a Q&A. "With software, the desired outcomes aren't always as clear-cut as they are with something like sales, where revenue is the measure, or marketing, where it's all about leads. Having consensus and clarity on the outcomes is obviously everything — that's what drives what you decide to measure."
Pinpoint currently has six jobs posted on its site, five of which are based in Austin.
The company's platform works with Jira, GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, SonarQube and several other systems.
“Software engineering is the heartbeat of business today,” Ethan Kurzweil, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said in a news release. “Despite numerous systems to automate individual phases of development, no platform exists today to holistically analyze, assess and drive better overall engineering performance. Pinpoint has the opportunity to do for software engineering what Salesforce did for sales and customer relationship management.”
