CPE news (02/24/2021) – Axiom Labs Inc., dba ZenHub, announced the completion of a $ 4.7M financing round led by BDC and Ripple Ventures involving a group of private investors (the most respected names in the developer tool ecosystem) .
ZenHub was founded in 2015 and is project management for teams working in GitHub.
looking ahead
Today development teams waste time doing administrative work instead of writing code. We are building a future in which nobody has to “do” project management. Here developers can simply concentrate on the code without compromising the organizational clarity of the project status. The funds we have raised will allow us to triple that vision and continue to enable our clients to focus on their most critical work.
Photo credit: ZenHub
Blog
Announcing $ 4.7M funding and the next phase of ZenHub’s automation journey
Aaron upright February 23, 2021
When we first set out to build ZenHub, our goal was simple: to make project management less painful for our team. As developers, we wanted to focus on coding, not updating the work. We were frustrated that we were constantly being pulled away from GitHub to provide project updates to the rest of our organization.
As it turned out, we were not alone in this frustration. Over the past six years, thousands of teams, from venture capital-backed startups like Mapbox and InfluxDB to forward-thinking companies like Shopify and Hubspot, have relied on ZenHub. Although our product has evolved significantly, we have continued to focus on our mission to help developers spend less time updating work and more time building.
We are excited to announce today that we have raised $ 4.7 million from BDC Capital and Ripple Ventures to accelerate this mission. Our main investors in this round include some of the most respected names in the developer tool ecosystem and leaders in product-driven growth, including: Adam Gross (Former CEO of Heroku), Jiaona Zhang (VP Product at Webflow), and Oji Udezue (VP Product at Calendly) to name a few.
As a previously self-financed and already profitable company, we believe now was the right time to increase.
The future is automated
Development resources are becoming increasingly expensive and companies are under pressure to expand these already strained resources even further. The global pandemic and tight budgets have only made this pain more acute. This has created a paradox: Development teams are under more pressure than ever to increase their speed and efficiency, but the same teams often lack the resources and training to become more agile.
At ZenHub, we believe automation is the answer.
While automation is not a new concept in software development, it rarely makes sense in most project management solutions. Solutions that promote automation often stop automating tasks for the individual. We see an opportunity to go beyond these simple automations and offer guided solutions to support teams with the most complex parts of agile development. Essentially, making agility more accessible.
Our vision for automation is like Tesla’s vision for the autopilot: as the driver, you are always in full control, but there are a number of specially designed features that can help you get rid of the most annoying and dangerous parts of driving. We believe ZenHub can play a similar role in expanding the most complex and time-consuming parts of project management to help teams become faster and more agile while maintaining full control of the process.
Bring our vision to life
With the publication of Automated Workflows in September last year, we took the first step towards realizing this vision. Automated workflows enabled teams to visualize their entire development workflow in a single view and to automate the handoff of work between teams. Today we introduce the next step in the automation journey: ZenHub Sprints.
ZenHub Sprints automates one of the most despised rituals in agile development – the sprint planning meeting. ZenHub Sprints is not only the first sprint planning experience built into GitHub, but it also enables teams to create and plan multiple sprints at the same time. Also, unfinished issues are automatically carried over between sprints, so teams no longer have to think about what and how to carry over.
Read more about ZenHub Sprints here.
Next, we apply our vision to software estimation, another fundamental element of agile development that, like sprint planning, is similarly frustrating and unnecessarily time-consuming. As the teams become more diversified, we see an opportunity to make estimating a more asynchronous process and help teams focus their attention and discussion on the most controversial issues.
looking ahead
Today development teams waste time doing administrative work instead of writing code. We are building a future in which nobody has to “do” project management. Here developers can simply concentrate on the code without compromising the organizational clarity of the project status. The funds we have raised will allow us to triple that vision and continue to enable our clients to focus on their most critical work.
We can’t thank everyone who has joined us so far on this journey, and we hope you are as excited as we are for the next steps!
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