How do you know whether staff are working efficiently? It’s an age-old problem for employers, but one that has come into even sharper relief as a result of the way Covid-19 has changed the workplace, particularly for software engineers. Insightly Analytics hopes it has some of the answers – and investors are backing it with a seed funding round to be announced today.
“The future of work is here now,” says Insightly’s founder and CEO Sudheer Bandaru of the way in which so many industries moved to remote or hybrid working practices during the pandemic, with no plans for a complete return to the workplace. “But we don’t have a means to manage it – to understand where that work is inefficient and how to put that right.”
Instead, says Bandaru, most businesses, including many otherwise technology-driven companies employing software engineers to solve complex problems, are sticking with old-fashioned methods. “People are going by their gut feelings, rather than the data-driven approach that most other functions of their business are employing,” he says. The result is that many companies don’t really know much about their workforce’s productivity – let alone how they might improve it.
That’s where Insightly’s tools come in. The idea is to provide tools that automatically map the work done during the software engineering processes, and to make that analysis easily accessible through dashboards that provide leaders with access to key metrics and a snapshot of productivity at any given moment. Businesses can see how long each part of the development cycle is taking, identify where any bottlenecks are occurring, and invest to put those bottlenecks right.
This isn’t just important to pure-play technology companies, Bandaru points out. “In today’s world, every company is a software company, and the speed and quality of software delivery heavily defines an organisation’s success.”
Insightly founder and CEO Sudheer Bandaru
Too many businesses are falling short, Bandaru says, pointing to research from the payments company Stripe suggesting that as much as $300 billion is being wasted annually by businesses with inefficient software development processes. Improving engineering productivity is a top priority for nine in 10 businesses in the research, but many just don’t know how.
Insightly’s rapid growth since its commercial launch just six months ago suggest its solutions are resonating with customers. Already, the company has signed up around 50 customers – these businesses collectively employ around 12,000 software engineers whose productivity is now being analysed for insight.
Importantly, the company’s service is size- and geography-agnostic. Some of its early adopters have teams of only 50 engineers; others have in excess of 800. The company also has customers from around the world. They sign up as subscribers to Insightly’s software-as-a-service model, paying a monthly fee for each engineer they want to onboard.
The rapid early growth of the business – and the commonality of the problem it is targeting – has prompted investors to take a significant interest in Insightly. The company’s seed funding round, announced today, has seen it raise $1 million from a broad range of investors, led by Together Fund, a venture capital fund launched last year by a group of technology sector leaders.
“Engineering efficiency is one of the biggest factors for business performance in today’s world,” says Girish Mathrubootham, the CEO of Freshworks and one of the founders of Together Fund. “Enabling engineering teams with actionable insights to help them identify and fix bottlenecks will be crucial.”
Other investors in the project include engineering and product leaders from businesses including Notion, GitLab, Square, Google and Amazon, many of whom face exactly the issues that Insightly is targeting. That’s important, argues Bandaru, because it validates the business’s appeal to its core customer base.
Insightly says integration of its technology can take just a few minutes, with no requirements for new coding. The cash raised today will support further product development, with Bandaru pointing to the bespoke demands of many of its customers, as well as investment in sales and marketing.
