Today marks a milestone at CodeSee. We announced $3 million in seed funding, co-led by boldstart ventures and Uncork Capital, with participation from Precursor Ventures, DCVC, and Salesforce Ventures, as well as our prominent angel investors including Edith Harbaugh of LaunchDarkly, and Guy Podjarny of Snyk, Dan Bentley of Tilt, and Adam Sah of CVS Health Tech.
We also expanded our support of the open source community with the launch of OSS Port—a platform connecting OSS projects to people, with tools to help developers overcome the barriers to taking on codebases.
The entire team at CodeSee is humbled and thrilled by the support we’ve received, both by our incredible investors and from the open source community, broadly. It has been a breathtaking ride.
Let’s onboard better
Believe it or not, not a lot has changed over the last 50 years in how we onboard developers to software projects. The process is cumbersome and error prone. Many developers still read a new codebase line by line.
When we started CodeSee in late 2019, we were driven by a collective goal: to help developers better understand increasingly complex, modern codebases. While this goal remains the same, our vision of how to address it has expanded along with CodeSee.
Developers need a fresh approach to understanding codebases; to be able to easily visualize a software system to identify its bounds and make accurate, informed decisions. They want to feel confident to push a change knowing they won’t bring down the entire system because they weren’t aware of a connection. And teams of devs want to foster shared understanding with those outside of engineering.
With the ability to collaborate from the same visual model, everyone can understand how code is meant to function. They can spend less time explaining and more time doing.
Exploring code with Maps
Maps auto-generates interactive code architecture diagrams that sync to a codebase as changes are made. With Maps, developers can visualize an entire codebase, with features highlighting file connections and demonstrating how updated code fits into the larger architecture. Using Tours, they can create and share visual walk-throughs of code. And because devs often need to be able to contextualize proposed code changes, they can use PR Maps to drive more dependable pull request reviews.
Insight into OSS Port
Contributing to and maintaining open source projects is not for the faint of heart. Open source devs face many of the same challenges as those working within a company. No matter a developer’s level of expertise, it takes a lot of effort and time to learn how to effectively onboard and navigate a new codebase. OSS Port is our way of ensuring any developer who wants to contribute to open source, can.
Port enables project maintainers to tag their projects with topics like ‘Education’ and ‘Social Good’, so contributors can search, select, and quickly onboard to the projects that matter most to them. The platform allows maintainers to provide contribution best practices, support guidance, and interactive visual walkthroughs of their codebase using CodeSee Maps—which will remain free forever for the open source community.
When hard work pays off
Today’s announcement comes a little more than a month after CodeSee was named one of the 20 “Rising Stars” as part of the Forbes 2021 Cloud 100 list, published by Forbes in partnership with Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures. These are “young, high-growth and category-leading cloud companies that have raised up to $25 million to date and are poised to join the Cloud 100 ranks.”
So, thank you!
We’re deeply flattered by the attention and support, and couldn’t be more stoked about what’s on the horizon for CodeSee. Above all, we’re grateful for the ability to continue building and delivering tools that truly improve the day-to-day lives of developers.
