Launchable raises $3.2M in seed funding to smarten tests up

Hello, world!

We are a stealth mode startup, so this is probably the first time you’ve heard about us. In the last couple of months, we’ve been busy building our team, the company, and fund-raising. We are very excited to announce that we have closed our seed funding round and hit a key early milestone in our journey. 

What do we do?

Development teams are paying millions of dollars running pointless tests. Besides the huge costs, these pointless tests don’t catch problems and consequently have a negative impact on productivity and morale of development teams. Launchable solves these infrastructure costs and productivity issues by identifying and running meaningful tests.

We are honored that our team and mission really excited top-tier Silicon Valley venture leaders, experienced entrepreneurs, and seasoned business executives who have supported us in this funding round.

We will reveal more of our plan as we go forward, so please subscribe to our mailing list, follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn so as not to miss these updates. 

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Our Mission 

We believe that software teams are going to drive every significant human achievement. However, engineering teams continue to operate as craftsmen while marketing & sales counterparts have stolen the march on using data to drive massive gains. 

Launchable’s mission is to transform these artisanal teams to data driven scientists delivering software confidently. We are bringing big data to the software development process and starting with the testing domain.

Increasingly, companies everywhere are using DevOps mantra to implement Digital Transformation initiatives. As DevOps thought leaders, we have seen companies go through multi-month/year efforts to improve their software delivery velocity.

In my past roles as Head of Product for CloudBees and Atlassian Bitbucket, I have had a front row seat to software teams struggling to improve their velocity. Hearing that they need to go through a 6-12 month cultural transformation is hard for these teams – they get it but the change isn’t happening fast enough. To top it, there is no guarantee that these changes will produce meaningful impact.

These DevOps transformation efforts are too slow and what really gets in the way of development teams are massive inefficiencies or waste in the testing process. 

Waste manifests in forms like running tests that don’t matter or tests that are flaky. This waste burns through a team’s infrastructure budget and more importantly waste a developers time.

Launchable uses data and machine learning to eliminate these inefficiencies during testing and consequently improve a team’s development velocity.

About our investors and advisors

We have been very fortunate to have found venture partners and angels who have deep domain expertise and believe in our mission, our vision, and our team.

Battery Ventures

Dharmesh Thakker – Dharmesh has been the earliest cheer-leader for the team and encouraged us to start Launchable. As one of the leader investors in the DevOps space (JFrog), he has seen companies struggle to deliver software fast and has been waiting for teams to tackle the testing domain. He has invested in companies like Databricks, Cloudera, SumoLogic amongst others.

Max Schireson – Max was the CEO Mongo DB and now an EIR at Battery. Max has been a sounding board for our ideas. Max is energized that Launchable is helping address a pain point that will make developers productive.

Unusual Ventures

John Vrionis – co-founder Unusual Ventures. John has worked with me from my past life at CloudBees. John deeply cares about developer productivity improvements and has often talked about the lack of innovation in the testing domain. I have been fortunate to be part of the Unusual Academy Gamma Cohort. John has invested in companies like AppDynamics, DataStacks, Mulesoft, Heptio, and CloudBees.

Angel Investors

Sri Viswanath – CTO Atlassian. Sri brings in thought leadership in challenges faced by software teams at scale. Sri has been a leader in companies like Groupon, Ning and Sun Microsystems. 

Noah Wasmer – Head of Technical Teams, Atlassian. As the head of industry defining products such as Jira, Bitbucket, OpsGenie, Jira Service Desk, Noah brings in a wealth of knowledge on the challenges faced software teams of all sizes. Before Atlassian, he was GM/SVP of the End User Computing Group at VMWare.

Sacha Labourey – CEO CloudBees. Sacha is a thought leader in the DevOps space and has helped organizations lead and scale DevOps transformations. Before CloudBees, Sacha was a co-founder of JBoss. 

Masaru Tange – Founded and IPOed SHIFT, Inc. Tange-san brings a wealth of experience in the QA domain. SHIFT is a QA company and incidentally doubling revenue every year.

Koki Uchiyama – Founded and IPOed Hottolink, Inc. Uchiyama-San brings in experience on data and AI to Launchable. Hottolink uses data, AI to help teams in decision-making. He is well known for mentoring entrepreneurs.

Jagmeet Lamba – Founder and CEO Certa. An early cheerleader of Launchable who deeply believes in the founding teams capability to innovate in the testing domain. Jagmeet brings experience helping navigate enterprise sales and ML.

Bob Bickel – CEO RunSignup, Advisor CloudBees, founder Redline13. Bob is a 30 year veteran in companies like BlueStone Software (HP). Bob has really done it all in the enterprise middleware, DevOps and testing space. That plus, he was the Apple Pie making champion in 1999.

Jay Manni – A cyber security veteran – VP of Eng for Dtex. He was the founding engineering leader in Fireeye and helped take it from the first few to IPO.

Michel Goossens – Angel Investor, Advisor and former Head of Sales CloudBees. Michel is the Guru in helping setup and scale enterprise sales teams and motion. He was also one of the early players in Magento.

Steve Harris – Advisor and former Head of Product CloudBees. Steve is an industry veteran and a product leader in the enterprise, middleware and DevOps space. In his past life, he was “Mr. Java” at Oracle and was the head of the Oracle WebLogic business unit. 

Advisors

Andrew Lee – Strategic Investor and Acquiror at Samsung SDS. Andrew brings in experience in M&A, partnerships in the enterprise software business. In his past life , Andrew has led the SpringSource acquisition into VMWare. 

I am very excited by this opportunity and the Launchable team to help customers deliver software confidently.