Swarmia, a software team productivity company based in Helsinki, Finland, has closed the funding round led by Alven only 12 months after its inception, one of the largest seed rounds in the region for such a young company. Existing investors Lifeline Ventures also invested in the round, alongside senior executives from Stripe, PeopleDoc, Uber and Dropbox. The funding will accelerate Swarmia’s mission of bringing visibility to engineering work and helping executives make the right data-driven business decisions. The new investment adds to Alven’s portfolio of developer tool companies which includes Stripe, Algolia or Sqreen (ex: Datadog) amongst many others.
The Pain
Every company is increasingly a software company, with engineering becoming the largest cost center of the modern organisation. However software engineering has frustratingly remained a black box for which progress is hard to monitor and manage objectively. Answering board-level questions such as “what are developers working on?”, “where should we hire/invest if we want to get this feature done by year-end?” or “how do we tie engineering progress to company OKRs?” always tend to veer on a not always reliable gut feel. Without full visibility, implementing best practices and good hygiene is notoriously difficult.
The Solution
The Swarmia story tells the story of its founder Otto Hilska himself – Otto, a repeat entrepreneur who built his first business at the age of 18, built Swarmia out of frustration with existing tools on the market. As an engineering leader himself, he had experienced firsthand how some metrics, if used improperly, can be damaging, and set out to build a solution & metrics that would drive a high performing, happy organization.
“The companies that move the fastest are going to be the future market leaders, and data-enabled continuous improvement is how you get there. The previous attempts to bring data to engineering management have been toxic. It shouldn’t be about tracking individuals, but rather about finding the significant systemic bottlenecks that slow down any product development organization.” say Otto Hilska, founder of Swarmia
The solution is not only key to efficiently manage valuable resources, but it is a contributing factor to reducing ‘developer burnout’, often stemming from unclear and shifting strategic direction, unrealistic deadlines, isolation vs. other teams, and draining maintenance.
“What Otto and his team have achieved in such a short time is impressive, and the rapid adoption by customers we introduced to Swarmia during our due diligence was very compelling. They’re well on their way to drive better working habits for the world’s 27m developers.” commented Thomas Cuvelier, Partner at Alven, who is joining the Swarmia Board.
Otto adds: “I was immediately impressed how well Thomas had done his homework about this space. When we started discussing the terms, I was also happy to see that Alven prioritized good outcomes for the company rather than trying to optimize every single term.”
If you are an organisation leader and would like to gain visibility on your organisation engineering metrics, get in touch for a product demo https://www.swarmia.com/demorequest/