PullRequest pulls in $2.3M seed round led by Google’s Gradient Ventures

PullRequest, a Y Combinator Summer 17 graduate, announced a $2.3 million seed round today led by Google’s new AI fund, Gradient Ventures.

The Slack Fund, Fika Ventures, Defy Ventures, Lynett Capital, FundersClub and Joe Montana’s Liquid2 Ventures also participated.

The company has been concentrating on providing code review as a service, a task that often gets lost in today’s high-speed agile development cycles. The company has set up a system of on-demand code reviewers who check for bugs, security issues, coding standards and performance problems.

That wouldn’t seem to have anything to do with the focus of Google’s Gradient Ventures mission, but company founder Lyal Avery says the road map for his company goes far beyond the code reviewer service.

They plan to bring automation to the coding process, so they can pick up issues automatically such as when dependency code, open source pieces in a particular application, have a critical update.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Slack also participated in this round as one of the first automation pieces PullRequest is working on involves a Slack bot to inform developers when one of those dependency pieces requires updating. While that project is still in Alpha testing right now, it’s the general direction of the company, Avery explained.

Avery recognizes that as his company builds up its code reviewing service, it’s going to create a mass of data about the coding process and common reviewer issues. He says that they are scoring and reviewing their code review projects to build that data set. While he doesn’t see a time when humans are removed from the reviewing equation, he does see using this data to automate the repair of common problems. “At the end of the day, it’s about how efficiently we drive code review,” he said.

When we spoke to Avery in August, the company had 200 reviewers and 300 companies on the platform. Today, it has 1000 companies and 1900 reviewers as the company has grown in leaps and bounds since then.

Avery moved back to Austin, Texas after graduating from Y Combinator, and has since hired four more people for a total of six employees. They plan on using this money to continue to grow the company and have plans to double the number of employees next month alone and go from there.