Shortly after taking the stage at Disrupt SF, development startup Koality just announced that it has closed its seed round. The $1.8 million round was led by FF Angel‘s Peter Thiel. Other angels and small funds participated as well.
The two founders used to work at Palantir where they initially met Peter Thiel. When I last talked to Koality co-founder and CEO Jonathan Chu, he told me that Thiel was very encouraging and really wanted them to start and build a new startup. The funding confirms that.
As a reminder, Koality is a seamless server-side application that sits between your startup’s repository and your engineers’ computers to improve code changes. You don’t have to change your workflow — but instead of pushing code to your repository, your patches will first go through Koality. The server will then run test suites before submitting to the repository. If there is something wrong with your code, you will receive a notification. Koality effectively ends broken builds and countless wasted hours.
Another advantage of Koality is that it can greatly speed up testing times. It runs tests in parallel on multiple replicas of your environment. Moreover, you don’t have to leave your computer open to run the tests because everything happens on the servers.
While Chu didn’t go into detail, he told me that the company already has very high-profile clients. Most of the teams that use Koality have 15 engineers or more. The product gets more expensive with bigger teams. That’s why the startup could expect significant revenue from startups over 100 engineers.
Webb Investment Network, Index Ventures, Felicis Ventures and UJ Ventures also participated in today’s seed round. Angels such as Kris Duggan, Raymond Tonsing and Tien Tzuo put some money as well.
The software testing platform is just a first product for Koality. While there is still some work to do to polish its existing offering, the startup plans to release other development products to help engineering teams and make their work easier. Testing was the biggest pain point and needed to be taken care of. But there are many other opportunities for the future.
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