PullRequest pulls in $8M Series A just months after scoring seed round
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Maybe for things like mobile applications or React or stuff like that, where there are many patterns to follow, it simpler to see if something may be wrong, but I still expect an high degree of false negatives.
At the beginning, maybe you sign up some super high-end 10X developers to do reviews. Also run some tools like SpotBugs or Coverity or something.
Then when the ammount of reviews goes up by 10X, what are you going to do? You can't possibly find many 10X developers that are willing to review random crap code.
So you end up reselling cloud-based Coverity licenses (SpotBugs is free).
Also, this only works if the company is willing to share its code with a random startup. Which is kind of a no-go for large shops. So who do you sell to? Large shops won't allow access to their code. Startups would, but they either won't pay in principle (hey we can use SpotBugs or Coverity) or won't pay much.
Can you make a business of it? I don't know, but there are some investments being made, so I guess there is a better story than the one I see.
On functional terms, we have a couple of thousand reviewers that have signed up to review. Our tooling helps them work faster; long term, we'll also provide this tooling to internal terms.
So far, we have about a dozen of the Fortune 500 signed up; larger teams, for a variety of reasons, are more open in some cases (one of the many learnings of this startup).
Edit: signed not signing.
"we have about a dozen of the Fortune 500 signing up"
Let's be honest. What this means is that someone in the Fortune 500 clicked on your email advertisement. Maybe installed your software.
Do you have anyone in Fortune 500 running critical business on your platform?
> we have a couple of thousand reviewers that have signed up to review.
Anyone can sign up a couple thousand "Mechanical Turk" reviewers in no time. Or "RentACoder" or whatever. What is the value provided? Where I work, the value of "review" provided by someone not deeply involved in the code is "0". Which is why you ask some relevant people to review the code.
I would say the difference on the reviewer side of our platform is in quality. We are working to surface this more.
The only right answer here is automated code formatting and linting.
`.map(ifSome).getOrElse(ifNone)` infers the type from `ifSome`, and forces `ifNone` to conform.
`.fold(ifNone)(ifSome)` infers the type from `ifNone`, and forces `ifSome` to conform.
Meanwhile, `match { case Some(x) => ifSome(x); case None(x) => ifNone }` will correctly infer from both cases at once, and give you the greatest common ancestor.
However, it does seem like the bigger need is the right code the first time. Of course, that's impossible, but this seems like a secondary need rather than the primary issue.
Totally true in places like mobile/react, or projects where teams are unlikely to have significant internal expertise despite technology in production (see a midsized game studio running an erlang server for chat) providing value is easy. We believe our approach is working, and will continue to get better.
(On a personal level -- huge fan of your work!)
Aside from that, I'm not sure if the employee developers will get annoyed with having a third-party come in and "tell them how to do things" or potentially mistakenly point out non-issues. I see why management may want to do this, but I wonder whether the developers will be pleased having a third-party put on their turf.
Companies like Atlassian should allow discounts on their bitbucket product if you allow an AI to learn from it, and then they should sell an advanced Lint or auto review feature based on training data from real code reviews. I think that's where the money is at. I wouldn't replace code reviews, but I'd use AI to sell a product that handles all the low hanging fruit for engineers so when it comes to code reviews, they only need to worry about the higher level stuff.
What kind of value do you get from an isolated code review from someone who is totally not familiarized with your business logic or your code base? Can someone here explain what would be a potential use case for this service?
Combine that with nose bleed pricing for said big banks and this would be a cash cow.
Welcome to AI redundancy.
Hard to tell. Closing rounds is not a guarantee of anything. VC model is to throw shit against the wall and see what sticks. The model is sound. So, say, Juicero took $150M and did not stick. But Dropbox did stick. It will hopefully pay for all Juiceros and other failed investments, and then some.
From their webpage: "We automatically learn from millions of available software programs and use this knowledge to make key suggestions on how to improve your code"
What I'm stuck on is mostly the legal implications.
1) Do companies want a relatively unknown poking around in their secret sauce? Ages ago, my father worked on a number of projects at Bell Labs where parts for custom prototypes where sourced to different vendors so none knew exactly what was being built. Yes, now is not then. None the less how will this risk be mitigated (beyond contracts and background checks)?
2) And what if something does go wrong? The reviewer(s) miss something and eventually the shit hits the fan. Now what?
No show stoppers. But friction enough to be curious how they fare.
I mean, why work on something if there is no technology differentiating you?
Technology doesn't differentiate, value propositions do.
A shameless plug, if you are interested investing into an intellectual property of an 'underdog' competitor, contact me - dmitry@articoder.com - I must have been doing something right, as I've had the exact same idea at the time and applied/interviewed with YC in the same batch as PullRequest. You can see the timeline for yourself at the internet archive of articoder.com.
Seriously though, I am curious if the quality will remain high as they scale. I wish them luck. I would bet one of the big players acquires them within 1-2 years.
Also: I'm lame, I went with "We're the Hotmail of Food Delivery." Still not sure how that deck worked out ;-) /s
I can't stand it when businesses appropriate terms with a well-established definition... From Salesforce calling their Ai product Einstein (complete with disgraceful cartoon mascot), to the recently launched "Stdlib"... Is it so hard to create your own unique brand and invest in that?
This reminds me of Zuckerberg naming his bot "Jarvis" - which I learned about a week after learning the dev lead on my team made a bot named "Jarvis". Unoriginal names are a pet peeve of mine. We have numerous pantheons and fandoms, yet everyone uses the same handful of names.