Developer workflow startup GitButler Inc. revealed today that it has raised $17 million in early-stage funding to accelerate product development and scale up its developer workflow platform to a broader market.

Founded in 2023, GitButler offers a platform that seeks to address user frustrations with Git, the version control system known for its complexity and reliance on manual processes.

A version control system is software that tracks changes to code over time and allows developers to collaborate, manage revisions and revert to earlier versions when needed. GitButler argues that many developers struggle with tasks in Git such as managing branches, resolving conflicts and organizing changes.

GitButler addresses the issues faced by developers using Git by building a more intuitive interface and workflow layer on top of it. The company’s platform offers features such as working on multiple branches simultaneously and organizing changes as structured patch series instead of traditional commits and, in doing so, allows developers to manage parallel workstreams more effectively.

The platform is designed to track and organize code changes automatically to reduce the need for manual intervention and lower the risk of errors. The idea is to make common workflows such as rebasing and merging less error-prone and easier to understand by rethinking how changes are grouped and applied.

“GitButler was started three years ago because we felt like our development practices have been shoehorned into what Git could do for such a long time, it would be amazing to see what we could do with tooling that was actually designed for those practices,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Scott Chacon.

The company recently launched, in technical preview, the GitButler CLI (pictured) to support its endeavors. The tool is designed for the GitHub Flow style, branched trunk-based workflows that many developers use.

The Series A round was led by a16z, with Fly Ventures GmbH and A.Capital Ventures also participating.

The investors say that the opportunity of GitButler is not in replacing Git, but in improving how developers use it. As software development becomes more complex and distributed, there’s increasing demand for tools that reduce cognitive load and allow developers to focus more on writing code rather than managing infrastructure and tooling.

Image: GitButler