Sleuth raised $22M Series A to help teams track and improve engineering efficiency

We are excited to announce that Sleuth has raised $22M in Series A funding, led by Felicis, joined by Menlo Ventures with participation from CRV. We’re disrupting the world of engineering efficiency and we're hiring, come join us!

Why we started Sleuth

Throughout my career, my passion has always been focused on building and scaling high performing engineering teams. However, a dirty little secret in engineering is that we have never had a real, quantitative and trustworthy measure of engineering efficiency.

When I started running Atlassian's Bitbucket team in 2010, we were early adopters of DevOps and frequent deploys, deploying about 2-3 times a week. We were a small team, growing fast, and maturing our process along the way.

A couple of years later we had a staging environment in place, over a million users, 25 developers, and we were deploying anywhere between 10 - 20 times a week.

I started to get questions from management about how our software delivery was going. I asked the same questions myself. It struck me, why is it that, even though engineering gets two-thirds of a company's budget, we have the least insight into how we're doing and performing?

My co-founders Michael and Don and I all saw the same thing at Atlassian while scaling and growing Bitbucket, Statuspage, Confluence and Enterprise cloud. It became clear to us that recent industry trends signaled a disruption in the status quo such that it was finally possible to measure engineering efficiency easily and accurately.

In 2020 we started Sleuth and our journey to provide organizations with accurate, hard metrics for engineering efficiency and the tools needed to improve.

Our Series A milestone adds amazing new partners in Felicis and Menlo Ventures to help us on our mission to transform how developers, managers and the rest of your organization understands and improves efficiency.

Engineering efficiency for everyone

Measuring the efficiency of an engineering team has always been very challenging for a multitude of reasons, namely tooling complexity, lack of access to data, and use of dubious proxy metrics that bred micromanagement and distrust (lines of code written, number of tickets closed anyone?).

Recent industry trends have made measuring engineering efficiency a solvable problem:

• Cloud-based tooling makes data more accessible.
• Standardized development workflows, such as git, makes it easier to create baselines and compare efficiency across teams.
• The popularity of studies-backed DORA metrics standardizes how efficiency can be measured, resolving once and for all the arguments on which metrics to use.

You can't improve what you don't measure, which is why you need metrics in place. But it's important to remember metrics are means to an end. The end goal is to provide teams with metrics and the no-code workflow and automations they need to improve.

To realize this vision we’re investing heavily in:

1) Metrics, metrics and more metrics

Accuracy is key, that's why we've invested heaps in making Sleuth the #1 most accurate (and complete) DORA metrics tracker in the market. However, to truly spot all bottlenecks we need to always be increasing the scope of information we provide. This means first class support for canary and region based deployments, deeper insights into change lead time, and much more.

2) Integrate with everything!

Sleuth already has over 40 integrations with the tools you use today. However, we’re not stopping there. Our goal is to support every tool your team uses today or may use tomorrow to help discover the bottlenecks anywhere from concept through to launch. You’ve invested in your tools and it’s our job to build your picture of efficiency via your existing investments without process change.

3) Automation and workflows so your team can improve

To improve engineering efficiency teams must experiment with improvements, measure those changes and repeat, continuously. Today, process improvements are often ad hoc and can be measured in weeks. We’re expanding our existing no-code automations Actions framework so teams can perform this cycle in hours, not weeks.

Join us on our journey

We’re growing our team so we can fulfill the promise of making engineering efficiency easily and accurately measurable and easy to improve.

We are a remote-first, fully-distributed team hiring across Engineering and other roles. Join us! Check out our open roles here.

It truly takes a village to build a growth company and this milestone wouldn’t be possible without the support of our community, customers, partners and early employees. Thank you all for your energy, hard work and support!