As a coding project gets bigger, and the more people involved, it becomes harder to see a bigger picture of how the whole project fits together, and this is especially true for distributed teams. Today, codesee, an early-stage startup that seeks to help development teams understand the entire code base, has released the OSS port, an open source project designed to help differentiate open-source teams. When it was, the company also announced the $3 million seed it received last year and had not released before. Boldstart Ventures and Uncork Capital led DCVC, Precursor Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, and several other angel investors led the round.
The goal of CodeSee as a whole is to help companies visualize and understand their code, which has become increasingly challenging with the increasing volume and the number of developers involved. “Code See is a developer tool that helps developers and teams deeply understand how code works,” explained CEO Shanea Leven, who co-founded the company with her husband, CTO Josh Leven.
CEO Leven says they’ve created an open-source product to get started because they’ve seen the real need for this service with various developers around the world in open source projects, and new people are joining all the time to get an overall idea of the code. If it works for these projects, it will serve as proof of ideas for the commercial version of the product. Leven, who has more than a decade of experience managing different levels of the company like Docker and Cloudflare, knows what happens when engineering teams don’t understand connections across the entire code base.
Ed Sim, managing partner of lead investor Boldstart, sees this ability to understand code base as a missing element of the development process and that could help the company retain engineering talent, because engineers usually leave after 12 months if they can’t master the codebase.
“If there’s a product that helps people master codebase [quickly], and this visual approach brings it to him, we’ve seen that it can be a huge opportunity to unlock value and ship better code faster, and Shanea really It showed us, ”he said. Since Leven and her husband built the company in the last 18 months, they now have 10 employees, and Black, CEO Leven says his personal experience has led him to build a very deliberately welcoming and inclusive culture in his company.
