Analytics has become an integral part of decision-making across almost every business function in the enterprise, from sales to human resources. But software engineering organizations often still operate without clear data about operations and developer productivity for lack of proper tooling.

That’s the market gap Santa Monica, California-based Linear B Inc. is looking to fill. The startup, which launched today with $1.6 million in seed funding, has built a platform that aims to give technology leaders the same level of insight into their team performance as the rest of the C suite.

The platform was born out of personal necessity. Dan Lines (pictured, right), Linear B’s co-founder and chief operating officer, told SiliconANGLE that the startup is tackling the kind of visibility gaps he and co-founder Ori Keren (left) experienced with their own software teams. Before founding the startup, the duo led engineering at CloudLock Inc., a cloud-based security provider that was acquired by Cisco Systems Inc. in 2016 for $293 million.

“I’m sitting at the executive table with the other executives, and all of them are using data to answer basic questions about their organization,” Lines said. “When it came around to me to present to the team and say how we’re doing, how we’re trending, I didn’t have any data to do that. I tried to put together some spreadsheets to collect data manually and it didn’t come out well. And I just thought, there has to be a better way to do this.”

Linear B’s platform can plug into a company’s software toolchain and automatically collect data about how developers go about their day-to-day work. It then uses a homegrown analytics methodology supported by artificial intelligence to turn the data into useful insights for executives.

Lines said the platform focuses on three major areas. First, it looks at performance metrics that are specific to the technology a developer is working with, such as the complexity of their code and the number of security issues present. Linear B competes with several other venture-backed startups, including Codacity Inc., on this front.

The two other criteria the platform prioritizes are more general. Linear B assesses high-level productivity indicators such as the size and frequency of a developer’s code commits, plus metrics relating to how effectively they work together with other team members. All that data is turned into visual dashboards that enable executives to quantify performance with a glance. 

According to Lines, the platform can clear up a wide range of questions that software groups previously struggled to answer. Executives can identify top performers to better prioritize employee retention efforts, as well as spot underperforming employees and determine exactly where they need to improve. It’s also possible to break down the data by project to see if there are bottlenecks that may be bogging down development.

Linear B pairs these insights along with a number of more advanced features. The platform can provide improvement recommendations to point executives in the right direction, as well as benchmark a team’s performance against that of units from other companies.

Linear B’s platform is currently in private beta.

Photo: Linear B