Programming-oriented question-and-answer startup Stack Overflow announced today it has raised a hefty $85 million in late-stage funding to accelerate the development of the company’s Teams software as a service knowledge management and collaboration offering as well as to expand into new markets.

The Series E round was led by GIC and included Silver Lake Waterman, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.

Founded in 2008, Stack Overflow has become a leader in Q&A for professional and enthusiast programmers through its extensive membership. The company’s open community offers a voting platform similar to Reddit that allows programmers to obtain answers and share their knowledge with others.

Stack Overflow’s service is more than its open community platform in 2020, however. The company provides a collaboration platform for developers and technologists to break down silos and work asynchronously, with an aim to ship products faster, accelerate onboarding, improve customer experience and drive innovation. Stack Overflow for Teams, the company’s private paid service, is pitched as a “home base for mission-critical knowledge” designed to assist companies in managing development internally with a focus on building products.

Complementary product offerings include an employment and hiring service to match companies with Stack Overflow users. The site has a community of more than 50 million monthly visitors along with 70 million more who visit Stack Exchange, the company’s network of other sites.

Stack Overflow for Teams has more than 200,000 paid users across more than 5,000 teams. Notable customers include Bloomberg L.P., Elastic NV, Expensify Inc., Microsoft Corp., Wix.com Ltd. and Zapier Inc..

The company said in a statement that given that the pandemic has reshaped what the future of work looks like. Stack Overflow for Teams “addresses this emerging customer need by connecting distributed employees and enabling them to easily access a central source of knowledge to unlock information,” the company said.

Prashanth Chandrasekar (pictured), chief executive officer of Stack Overflow, spoke to SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio theCUBE in May discussing the company’s transition to SaaS.

“We know we’re in this beautiful Goldilocks zone of digital transformation where everybody is accelerating, even given the current environment,” Chandrasekar explained. “In our Teams business, it’s all about our customers getting value from the collaboration SaaS platform that they’ve signed up for. We are really trying to transform and accelerate into a SaaS company.”

Photo: SiliconANGLE