Phil Reynolds felt exasperated at times during team meetings at his former enterprise software development company, BriteCore, which oversaw a slew of projects and software tools for customers.
“It was impossible to put together the data to figure out what was going on across 17 implementations and 40 products,” BriteCore founder and former CEO Phil Reynolds said.
They needed software to help them adequately track progress across projects and get a big picture view, but everything on the market fell short. Now, Phil Reynolds and his former BriteCore colleagues are turning that frustration into a new Kansas City tech startup, DevStride, which developed strategic project and portfolio management software for agile software development teams.
The startup closed a $3.2 million pre-seed funding round in August led by Overland Park-based Flyover Capital and used the funding to add five new employees in key roles such as sales, marketing, engineering and quality control. It’s also using the money for product research and development to add new features and expand capabilities.
In addition to Flyover, the round included an angel network, individuals mostly from the Kansas City area, and former BriteCore customers — a point of validation that DevStride is solving a meaningful challenge, Phil Reynolds said.
“As soon as our team got acquainted with the DevStride team, we were pretty sold,” Flyover Capital Partner Dan Kerr said. “DevStride is indicative of the maturing of our tech ecosystem and the next founder generation that we’re starting to see.”
Kerr cited the team’s prior success at BriteCore, which evolved from a bootstrapped startup to a company with 350 employees that raised Series A and Series B funding rounds. DevStride’s diverse founding team also is locally rooted, but globally minded, and their combined skill sets are “creating magic,” he said.
“That experience that we had previously really helped us bring this to life,” DevStride co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer Chastin Reynolds said.
Phil Reynolds, who left BriteCore 18 months after the Series B, said the DevStride team could solely focus on the problem that BriteCore faced, which helped them build the technology faster.
Through DevStride’s software, customers can find the insights they need in one place. They can filter data on the macro and micro levels to track progress and performance. The software also requires users to organize information based on core business functions and objectives, which helps employees prioritize the right things and understand how their work fits into the big picture, she said. It also fosters better collaboration between siloed teams, he said.
Through DevStride, the founders want to help companies drive success and reduce failure rates. Phil Reynolds cited Gartner research, which found that about 70% of the time, software development teams fail to achieve the business objectives, and that software projects get scrapped 44% of the time.
“More than half of the work that gets done in the software field ends in total failure. … That’s a stat that people don’t always talk about a lot because it’s scary,” he said. “Our thesis is that the reason these things fail is it’s just too hard to detect what’s going on.”
DevStride is tackling a ubiquitous problem in software development and has potential to become a major player, Kerr said.
“Anything you can do to save time and optimize your labor force is huge, especially right now where one more software developer is very costly. They’re putting a dent in that, and that unlocks a huge amount of value,” Kerr said.
