Every development team needs documentation to help onboard new developers and track the details behind the project. If you’re producing an external API, it’s even more critical to have good instructions on how to implement it, but it’s traditionally an area that most programmers don’t love keeping up with.
That’s where Swimm, an Israeli startup, comes in. It’s created a solution to prompt developers to include documentation, make it easier to create it, and even lets them know when it’s fallen out of date. Today the company announced a healthy $27.6 million Series A to keep growing the solution. It is also releasing Swimm in beta today.
The round was led by Insight Partners and Dawn Capital with help from existing investors Pitango First and TAU Ventures. Swimm said it has now raised a total of $33.3 million.
Oren Toledano, CEO and co-founder at Swimm, says documentation often gets short-changed by developers, who would prefer to concentrate on coding, and the company wanted to make it easier and more integrated with the coding process.
“The goal of Swimm is to create an easy way for developers to create documentation that is very coupled with the code itself. … And I think the most important part of it is that once we’ve connected the code to the docs, Swimm is able to follow changes in the code base itself and flag docs that are outdated because something has changed,” Toledano said.
Swimm actually becomes part of the delivery pipeline, either through the IDE or on GitHub, and it can flag whenever there is a change. It works much like comments in a word processing program where you can accept those changes or make additional corrections as you see fit. The solution is language-agnostic, meaning it should work for all types code.
In essence, Toledano said the company is treating the documentation as code.
“The docs sit where the code sits in the user’s repository, and it behaves as code, meaning when you’re pushing your code, you’re also pushing Swimm documentation, and it goes through the same process, the same CI [pipeline], the same apps that deploy code, and then we’re able to use this environment to make sure that the documentation stays up-to-date,” he said.
The company currently has 30 employees, with a couple of people in the U.S., one in Berlin and the rest in Tel Aviv. He says that the employee base is over 40% women today, and as they hire they want to move that to half. They intend to build the hiring infrastructure to make sure they are bringing in a diverse group of candidates.
“Once we get there, I think we are going to be open and ready with the knowledge and infrastructure in terms of the HR and people infrastructure we’re building to look at additional populations that are underrepresented in Israel,” he said. “And the way to do it is to partner with organizations that are [active] in Israel to promote this population to the high-tech world.”
The company launched in 2019 and got $5.7 million in seed funding in April 2020. Today’s round closed in May.