GenAI has become an important part of coding workflows, but most companies struggle to track its usage, let alone return on investment. Israeli startup Milestone wants to power a platform designed to correlate AI tool usage with engineering metrics such as code quality.
The problem is that these companies have to give Milestone access to their codebases, which investors initially questioned, CEO and co-founder Riad Eridan told TechCrunch. But the startup, whose customers include Kayak, Monday, and Sapiens, has now raised $10 million in a seed round led by San Francisco-based venture firm Heavybit and Israeli fund hanaco Ventures.
In an unusual arrangement, Eridan and Milestone’s CTO had gone years without meeting in person before they began raising money. Unlike many of Milestone’s team members who are based in Israel, Professor Stephen Barrett lives in Ireland and teaches computer science at Trinity College, Dublin. Mr. Eridan was once his student, and the two bonded over a software project.
Despite the distance, the two stayed in touch over the years and eventually decided to form a startup focused on engineering efficiency, just as coding assistants and other code generation tools were becoming popular. Since then, GitHub Copilot has surpassed the 20 million user mark, but businesses still lack visibility into how these tools are being used and impacting productivity.
According to Elidan, Milestone relies on four pillars to answer these questions: the codebase, the project management platform, the team structure, and the Codegen tool itself, creating what he calls the “genAI data lake.” In fact, this provides organizations with actionable data about which teams are using AI and to what effect, thanks to their own information.
With this data, Eridan says, administrators who are under constant pressure to leverage AI to improve productivity will be able to measure the speed of feature delivery, for example, as well as see whether recent bugs were caused by AI-generated code and make informed decisions about where to implement these tools.
This gives Milestone a front-row seat when it comes to ROI, the “holy grail question” that they aim to answer granularly for their customers. But in the big picture, “we don’t have customers who use Milestones to say, ‘Okay, GenAI is useless, I’m revoking all my licenses,'” he said. In fact, the opposite is true. They want to try out more Gen AI tools. ”
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This fast-paced adoption also means milestones must keep up with a rapidly evolving landscape. “It used to be autocomplete, then it was chat, then it was agent-based chat, and that’s still the case,” Eridan said.
This is also where Barrett’s academic background helps the team understand the wave of transformation that customers are experiencing. “A lot of the ways we’ve traditionally thought about engineering are going to have to change,” he told TechCrunch. “I think in some ways AI is filling teams and engineers are becoming managers.”
To keep up with the tools driving this wave, Milestone says it has partnered with a number of vendors, including GitHub, Augment Code, Qodo, Continue, and Atlassian. Atlassian is driving Jira, and its venture arm Atlassian Ventures is also participating in this seed round.
The round was also supported by angel investors, including GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, former AT&T CEO John Donovan, Accenture senior technical advisor Paul Daugherty, and former Datadog president Amit Agrawal, all of whom understand that what Milestone is building is relevant to the enterprise market, Eridan said.
This focus on enterprise was intentional from day one, and Milestone even said no to prospects that were too small. “It’s very difficult,” Eridan said, but it allowed the startup to define a roadmap that required enterprise qualifications and capabilities. His main advice to other founders is “focus,” and Milestone embraces that. Even if the startup grows, it won’t expand into measuring the impact of GenAI on marketing and other functions.
