One little coding mistake can cost product teams time and money, but many still check for errors late in the process. Trunk wants to help engineering teams "shift left," or check their work at every step.
On Tuesday, the San Francisco startup announced a $25million Series A that was led by Initialized Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, and also included Haystack Ventures, Garage VC and several individual investors.
The company was founded in 2021 by co-CEOs David Apirian and Eli Schleifer, as well as Chris Clearwater and Matt Matheson.
Apirian is a former Uber ATG engineer who oversaw teams in the company's self driving car division, where he experienced the struggle involved in managing their code repositories and testing procedures.
"You accumulate more and more automated tests to the point where sometimes these tests have a chance of failing, and if you have a thousand tests and every test has a one-in-a-thousand chance of failing, something is always failing," Apirian told me.
It's an opaque system that can cause delays and frustration.
Trunk's main product, Check, allows customers to integrate continuous testing to prevent coding errors from compounding. It has 12,000 installs, Apirian told me. And the company also launched a web app version of the software on Tuesday.
It's also working on another tool called Merge which will automatically manage a team's code as it's queued up for more testing and review.
Trunk prices its software on a custom basis, and offers it for free to open source projects as well as small teams with up to 10 users. As it builds out its tools, customers will have access to the whole suite for a single price.
The goal is to give teams of any size access to similar engineering tools that Big Tech companies have built internally with their own enormous budgets and workforces.
"Uber has thousands of software engineers. Companies even at that scale are still getting it wrong and having to over invest and can't invest enough to build out the stuff that Google and Facebook have built," Apirian said." And that's really wrong. They shouldn't have to. They should just have a product that they can buy that gets them that same caliber of developer experience."
Trunk currently has 14 employees and Apirian wants to double that by the end of the year as it continues to build out its vision for a so-called DevEx-in-a-box solution for engineering teams.
