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Santa Monica-based software engineering startup LinearB has raised $50 million in Series B funding led by San Francisco’s Tribe Capital, the company announced Monday.
New investor Salesforce Ventures and existing investors Battery Ventures and 83North also participated in the round, which takes LinearB’s total capital raised to $71 million.
LinearB, which also has offices in Tel Aviv, Israel, was founded in 2018 by Ori Keren and Dan Lines, former executives at cybersecurity firm Cloudlock (which was acquired by Cisco for $293 million in 2016). Informed by difficulties in scaling software development at Cloudlock, the pair launched LinearB, which is essentially a productivity tracker for engineers that provides data analytics and workflow metrics. The platform documents how many hours have been spent coding, how long it took to deploy code and what percentage of code was failing or creating problems.
The startup said it has grown its customer base from 1,500 to 5,000 software development teams “in the past year,” including clients at Bumble, BigID, Cloudinary, Unbabel and Drata. The new funding will be used to expand LinearB’s engineering, sales and marketing teams and further develop its product.
As working from home becomes the norm, LinearB is one of several software-focused companies aiming to meet the demands of a remote engineering workforce. Sourcegraph, a code-collaboration startup based in San Francisco, has been used by the likes of Tinder and Amazon to help scattered engineers annotate and collaborate on code. Jellyfish, a Boston-based productivity startup, helps managers see what work engineers spend their time on each day.
Software as a service (SaaS) companies face a constant problem. They need money upfront to fund operations but their customers want to pay monthly. That means SaaS companies have to either provide discounts upwards of 40% for upfront payments or raise more capital, which hurts existing shareholders.
Enter Pipe, a new platform launched last September that enables companies with recurring revenues to tap into their deferred cash flows with an instant cash advance against the full annual value of software subscriptions. Facilities range from $10,000 to several million dollars per month, depending on the size of companies.
Pipe announced Tuesday it has raised $6 million in seed funding led by Craft Ventures, with participation from Fika Ventures, MaC Ventures, Naval Ravikant, WorkLife Ventures, Liquid2 and The Weekend Fund.
"Until now, the main financing option for SaaS companies has been dilutive equity rounds," said David Sacks, Co-Founder & General Partner at Craft Ventures, in a statement. "Pipe is the tool every SaaS founder has been waiting for. It allows SaaS companies to grow without dilution by financing their SaaS receivables."
Pipe is led by entrepreneurs Harry Hurst, Josh Mangel, and Zain Allarakhia. Hurst previously founded the car booking platform, Skurt, which was acquired by Fair.com for $50 million in 2018.
Pipe has offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco with support functions in Phoenix.