Jellyfish raises $31.5 million to align engineering teams with business objectives

Jellyfish, a software engineering management platform that helps managers align engineering work with business objectives, has raised $31.5 million in a series B round of funding led by Insight Partners.

Founded in 2017, Boston-based Jellyfish is setting out to do for engineering team leaders what customer relationship management (CRM) systems have been doing for sales teams for years — using data “to inform decision-making to improve how work is done and how it’s measured,” Jellyfish cofounder and CEO Andrew Lau told VentureBeat.

Rather than relying on manual data collection, Jellyfish promises a real-time, data-driven view into how engineering teams are spending their time and how this relates to company strategy.

Signals

The Jellyfish platform analyzes “engineering signals and contextual business data,” which includes the data produced by the myriad developer tools out there — such as issue trackers and source code management tools, among other DevOps tools — to determine what teams are working on, what progress they’re making, and how teams and individuals are performing from a productivity standpoint. Jellyfish also taps broader business data sources spanning product roadmap, customer usage, revenue, calendars, and HR.

“This provides leaders of engineering organizations with the visibility needed at every level, from the progress or impediments of roadmap items to the productivity of a single engineer,” Lau said. “Jellyfish shows where engineering organizations are focusing their time and resources and how those teams are executing.”

Above: Jellyfish: Team activity view

Jellyfish integrates with all the common developer and business tools, including GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Aha, and Google Sheets.  “Each of these tools helps paint a picture of where work time and resources are spent,” Lau added.

By aggregating all this data, companies can glean insights such as how much of the engineering team’s time and effort is spent on building new features versus maintenance, how quickly a team is shipping new products, and whether they are on schedule. However, it’s worth noting that Jellyfish isn’t strictly about getting engineering teams to ship products faster or more efficiently; it’s more focused on ensuring teams are pushing in the same direction toward the company’s broader business objectives. This could be aligned with any specific goal framework, such as objectives and key results (OKRs).

“Jellyfish allows engineering leaders to measure the engineering team’s work across various customizable axes in order to visualize how that work compares to the goals and priorities of the business, and what adjustments might need to be made,” Lau continued.

Above: Jellyfish: Team view

The company said it saw significant growth and momentum last year, with its revenue rising fivefold and its headcount doubling. The massive global push to remote work has increased demand for cloud-based tools such as Jellyfish, with new customers like DataRobot, Skillsoft, and ZoomInfo joining the likes of Toast, Medium, and Mastercard subsidiary SessionM.

Numerous developer-focused startups attracted sizable VC investments in 2020, spanning project management and issue tracking, universal code search, and even recruitment. Given that every company is now effectively a software company, demand for developers and tools to support them will only grow. This will in turn drive the need for companies to track how their engineering teams are performing in relation to company strategy, which is where Jellyfish’s real-time, data-driven platform comes into play.

Jellyfish had previously raised $12 million via its Accel-led series A round last May, and this latest round included repeat investments from Accel and Wing Venture Capital. Jellyfish said it now plans to “scale its customer base” and grow its headcount throughout 2021.

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