Codebase tutorial provider Swimm Tech Ltd. said today it has raised $5.7 million in a seed funding round led by Pitango First.

TAU Ventures, Axon Ventures and Fundfire, plus a group of high profile angel investors including the founder of code security provider Snyk Ltd., participated in the round as well.

Swimm also announced the official launch of its platform, which makes it easy for developers to share information and learn about any code base. The idea is that by sharing this information, processes such as developer onboarding and inter-team collaboration can proceed faster and more smoothly.

Swimm’s four co-founders, Gilad Navot, Oren Toledano, Tom Ahi Dror and Omer Rosenbaum (pictured), say that understanding code written by other people is one of the main challenges that any software organization faces today. The problem is that each piece of code is entirely unique, and if there is no knowledge base available, it can take weeks to onboard and train new developers, leading to delays in various projects. The problem is made worse because most code is constantly changing and evolving.

The co-founders identified this lack of understanding of code as a major pain point while running the Israel Tech Challenge, a high-tech academy that trains graduates in cybersecurity and data science before finding them placements at software companies to gain more experience.

“We immediately saw how much time, resources and effort companies had to invest into training developers, even experienced ones,” said Swimm Chief Executive Officer Toledano said.

Swimm’s platform helps developers understand and navigate new code faster by creating tutorial units and documentation that’s based on the most current version. One of its main features is its auto-sync technology, which ensures that the tutorial units are constantly updated for the most recent version of the codebase. In effect, it enables something called “continuous documentation,” the company said.

Not least, Swimm’s platform is language-agnostic, which means it can work with any kind of coding language. It’s compatible with all of the major Git hosting services too, so developers can look at the code in any repository on GitHub, for example, find the documentation for that code, and then start learning how it works through Swimm’s tutorials.

“The Swimm platform helps to create tutorials from existing Pull Requests, or from the code, yet the text comments are written by the ‘Swimmer,'” Swimm co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Omer Rosenbaum told SiliconANGLE. “Swimm automatically suggests updates to the tutorials when the code changes.”

Swimm can work for code that lacks documentation too, Rosenbaum said. In that case, however, users would need to create the initial documentation using Swimm, and then the platform keeps it up to date by itself.

Pitango First Partner Yair Cassuto said he was attracted to Swimm because software development has become a core capability for every modern business. “Swimm provides a structured, contextual and transparent way to improve developer productivity, allowing for rapid and insightful onboarding on any codebase,” he said.

With its seed funding in the bank, Toledano told SiliconANGLE, Swimm is now looking to hire more experienced developers to help accelerate the development of core features in its platform. Ultimately, it aims to make Swimm a fully integrated part of the development cycle.

“We hope that with Swimm, we are able to positively impact the agility of teams and help them sync at the same pace by which code evolves,” Toledano said. “We are focusing on helping growth-mode startups and companies that are scaling their engineering efforts, to efficiently align their knowledge and code and to deal with the challenges of dispersed teams working asynchronously.”

Photo: Yoram Reshef