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PullRequest pulls in $8M Series A just months after scoring seed round
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- megadeth 9y agoHow’re they achieving this ? Static analysis, linting ?
- drchiu 9y agoIt looks like they use real live human reviewers. Seems like a great remote job position.
- 505aaron 9y agoI am guessing the pitch went "It is like Uber for code review" /s Seriously though, I am curious if the quality will remain high as they scale. I wish them luck. I would bet one of the big players acquires them within 1-2 years.
- UK-Al05 9y agoYeah, it's hard enough to find quality Devs as it is. When your entire business is about high quality Dev review your going to need a lot of them.
- lyal 9y agoThanks much -- this is a company, product, and project where we have the liberty and passion to say that quality is what we care the most about. Also: I'm lame, I went with "We're the Hotmail of Food Delivery." Still not sure how that deck worked out ;-) /s
- austinjp 9y agoTheir front page shows "pullrequest [bot]" commenting on a commit. Very curious as to exactly how they're making that work.
- lyal 9y agoYes; one of the reasons I created the company was to give flexibility to people I've seen drop out of the industry for one reason or another (be it having kids, illness, etc). It's a real shame when life condition means that years of incredible experience go away.
- antirez 9y agoI'm not sure what the intended audience for this is exactly, but I know for sure that in certain software that have an high degree of complexity and moving parts, to see if the PR is sane you need to be an expert of that code base. No way to make "local" decisions. (cit. Butterfly Effect) Maybe for things like mobile applications or React or stuff like that, where there are many patterns to follow, it simpler to see if something may be wrong, but I still expect an high degree of false negatives.
- austinjp 9y agoIndeed. I'm really curious about the example I saw on their front page, apparently showing a bot commenting that "accessing this ImageView outside the main thread may cause crashes in this app". Is this genuinely possible to achieve?
- carterehsmith 9y agoHmmm so how do you scale this business of reviewing code? At the beginning, maybe you sign up some super high-end 10X developers to do reviews. Also run some tools like SpotBugs or Coverity or something. Then when the ammount of reviews goes up by 10X, what are you going to do? You can't possibly find many 10X developers that are willing to review random crap code. So you end up reselling cloud-based Coverity licenses (SpotBugs is free). Also, this only works if the company is willing to share its code with a random startup. Which is kind of a no-go for large shops. So who do you sell to? Large shops won't allow access to their code. Startups would, but they either won't pay in principle (hey we can use SpotBugs or Coverity) or won't pay much. Can you make a business of it? I don't know, but there are some investments being made, so I guess there is a better story than the one I see.
- agitator 9y agohmm... I don't know if this would ever be worth the money. Any real engineering outfit knows that the value in code reviews isn't just in uncovering syntactic or logical flaws, but actual engineering decisions. And part of the evolution and learning process of a team is in code reviewing together. I think if you really don't give a shit about code maintainability, but want a working product, then yeah this is for you. Companies like Atlassian should allow discounts on their bitbucket product if you allow an AI to learn from it, and then they should sell an advanced Lint or auto review feature based on training data from real code reviews. I think that's where the money is at. I wouldn't replace code reviews, but I'd use AI to sell a product that handles all the low hanging fruit for engineers so when it comes to code reviews, they only need to worry about the higher level stuff.
- zapita 9y agoI like the idea and think this could grow into a successful business... But my god what a terrible name. I can't stand it when businesses appropriate terms with a well-established definition... From Salesforce calling their Ai product Einstein (complete with disgraceful cartoon mascot), to the recently launched "Stdlib"... Is it so hard to create your own unique brand and invest in that?
- kraftman 9y agoNaming things is hard!
- stephengillie 9y agoYou could call it Pandora Nexus. This reminds me of Zuckerberg naming his bot "Jarvis" - which I learned about a week after learning the dev lead on my team made a bot named "Jarvis". Unoriginal names are a pet peeve of mine. We have numerous pantheons and fandoms, yet everyone uses the same handful of names.
- dchichkov 9y agoI would guess it was YC that had suggested the name. Am I right?
- lyal 9y agoNo.
- chiefalchemist 9y agoOn one hand, having the fresh eyes of an objective third party review code feels like a great idea. What I'm stuck on is mostly the legal implications. 1) Do companies want a relatively unknown poking around in their secret sauce? Ages ago, my father worked on a number of projects at Bell Labs where parts for custom prototypes where sourced to different vendors so none knew exactly what was being built. Yes, now is not then. None the less how will this risk be mitigated (beyond contracts and background checks)? 2) And what if something does go wrong? The reviewer(s) miss something and eventually the shit hits the fan. Now what? No show stoppers. But friction enough to be curious how they fare.
- paulie_a 9y agoYour secret sauce is your sales team and ability to get customers to use the features. Outside of dropping secret keys etc, your actual implementation in source code is nearly irrelevant. If you depend on keeping your code a total secret you are in for a world of hurt. Ex-employees certainly have copies laying around that could be leaked intentionally or just nabbed by some malware
- fizwhiz 9y agoyou do realize that trade secrets are a thing, right?
- hyperpallium 9y agojust not in enterprise code
- agitator 9y agoThat's an odd position to take.... If there was nothing special about the code you worked on, then the product is probably not all that significant. I mean, why work on something if there is no technology differentiating you?
- paulie_a 9y ago
- htd23 9y agoSpeaking of automating the process, "Learning From Large Codebases" https://www.srl.inf.ethz.ch/raychev_thesis.pdf https://www.srl.inf.ethz.ch/raychev_thesis.pdf won the Honorable Mention for the 2016 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award; www.deepcode.ai is building on the technology. From their webpage: "We automatically learn from millions of available software programs and use this knowledge to make key suggestions on how to improve your code"
- nnd 9y agoI wonder if there is a market for indie developers looking for a code review for their side projects?
- scottharveyco 9y agoThis was my first thought, having a second person look at a particularly tricky PR could be quite useful sometimes.
- whoisjuan 9y agoThey must be having some sort of decent traction to close these rounds, so that means that they have a strong use case. But honestly, I fail to understand what's that use case. What kind of value do you get from an isolated code review from someone who is totally not familiarized with your business logic or your code base? Can someone here explain what would be a potential use case for this service?
- koolba 9y agoI have no firsthand knowledge on them in particular, but I know that large financial institutions are sorely lacking in this department. If they can pay someone and get something in return then it’s a net win. It doesn’t have to be great. Just enough that an exec can justify a line on a PowerPoint for “N bugs eliminated”. Combine that with nose bleed pricing for said big banks and this would be a cash cow.
- poulsbohemian 9y agoBut see that's the crazy irony... I guarantee you those large financial institutions used to have teams for this kind of thing, then decided they were a bottleneck and too costly, so they offshored the work or got rid of the function altogether. So they reap what they sow.
- hyperpallium 9y agoAnnual license would be far less than the total cost of employing that team (roughly 2x salary). Welcome to AI redundancy.
- sheeshkebab 9y agoBig financial institutions would have the least of interest of giving this kind of access to source code for reviews by who knows who from some cloud service.
- carterehsmith 9y ago> They must be having some sort of decent traction to close these rounds, so that means that they have a strong use case. Hard to tell. Closing rounds is not a guarantee of anything. VC model is to throw shit against the wall and see what sticks. The model is sound. So, say, Juicero took $150M and did not stick. But Dropbox did stick. It will hopefully pay for all Juiceros and other failed investments, and then some.
- poulsbohemian 9y agoMuch like the slow food movement, it feels like we need a slow software movement. The article talks about the compressed cycles leaving no room for quality assurance. Sigh. After the dotCom crash, QA / test teams went away in a lot of places because it was deemed too expensive. Time marches on and now we have a generation brainwashed into thinking unit testing and "code reviews" constitute QA, and apparently want us to buy into the idea that it "takes too long" so we'd better just outsource it. Jeez I feel old.
- lyal 9y agoYes; unfortunately QA was used here, when QA doesn't capture what we do. Probably my fault in the interview.
- dchichkov 9y agoCongrats to PullRequest! They are solving a really good problem! A shameless plug, if you are interested investing into an intellectual property of an 'underdog' competitor, contact me - dmitry@articoder.com - I must have been doing something right, as I've had the exact same idea at the time and applied/interviewed with YC in the same batch as PullRequest. You can see the timeline for yourself at the internet archive of articoder.com.