Trunk, a platform that helps developers fix their code earlier in their workflow, raised $25 million in early funding today alongside an update to its flagship Trunk Check product.

Garry Tan’s Initialized Capital and Andreessen Horowitz co-led the Series A funding round, which follows $3.5 million in seed funding. Other investors participating in the round included Haystack Ventures, Garage VC and the Chief Executive of GitHub Tom Warner.

Founded in early 2021, Trunk’s solution allows developers to move more readily to “shift left,” which is the practice of pushing automated testing and checks earlier in the development process. With a product that checks code as it’s generated, developers can quickly produce cleaner code before it’s merged into repositories.

The primary component of Trunk is known as Trunk Check, which launched into beta four months ago. It brings together numerous open-source tools that assist with the automation and management of code, including checking, linting or automated checking for errors, static analysis and auto-formatting.

Trunk calls this a “developer experience in a box,” where instead of needing to bring together a large number of disparate tools in order to build a stack, the company has already done the heavy lifting. All the development team needs to do is open up the box and get going, according to Trunk.

“We started Trunk because DevEx, developer experience, is an industry-wide mess,” said Eli Schleifer, co-founder and co-chief executive of Trunk. “The workflows of coding, testing, and merging code is a fragmented landscape that has created tremendous developer inefficiencies. The feedback from our early users and founding customers has only reinforced the need to bring a unified DevEx platform to market.”

Check manages discovery, installation, creation and running of code analysis tools. The objective is to allow software engineers to integrate directly into development environments and workflows in order to maintain velocity by shipping cleaner code from keyboard to merge.

Developers need only install Trunk on their machine and it provides them access to an easy-to-use command-line tool and a Visual Studio extension. The company also supplies a GitHub Action that lets developers integrate Trunk into continuous integration workflows so that results will be checked during pull requests.

In tandem with the funding, the company released updates to Check that provide developers with a web-based dashboard designed to give an overall view of the health and historical timeline of the codebase. By providing a real-time and historical look at how coding is going, Trunk believes that it will empower developers to see what’s currently affecting their codebase and give them a better chance to get on top of any issues that might be affecting their build.

Trunk is also developing another tool called Trunk Merge, currently with a waitlist for early access, which manages pull requests to maintain a repository. According to the company, Merge will automate the orchestration of merges to make certain that code passes tests before code is added to the main branch.

Photo: Pixabay