For years, startups have tried to bridge the various gaps to help businesses improve their processes on the surface, groan and help managers identify and deal with where their teams are wasting their time.
The most recent part in this cohort is Hacker Pulse. This has created a platform that provides more information about what the engineering team is doing to enable enterprises to find productivity bottlenecks and resolve inefficiencies.
The San Francisco-based company offers tools such as revenue markers and user analytics, as well as dashboards that integrate with developer tools used by engineers such as GitHub, Gitlab and Bitbucket. HackerPulse brings all this information together so that team leaders can see where and how their engineering team is spending their time. The startup says the tool will also help to better build a group of engineers for a particular project.
Gleb Braverman, co-founder and CEO of Hackerpulse (pictured above, center), says the tool is not intended to be used to track the number of code engineers are writing – the platform cannot do that. Instead, they argue that the goal is to help managers understand how to make their engineering team work better.
“It's very difficult to understand what the engineering team is doing exactly and where their time is focused,” Braverman said. “If you have a bottleneck, if your engineers and teams are spending a lot of time on meetings, or if you have productive time where you actually have problems. Technically, all this information is available, but you have to spend a lot of time actually getting it.”
Braverman said his startup is engineer-friendly. This is because the platform was originally designed as a product that allows engineers to track their own progress, but has been transformed into a B2B solution due to enterprise demand.
HackerPulse is Braverman's second startup. Venture capitalist Bilgurley, a general partner at Benchmark Capital, said he was surprised he wasn't trying to confuse LinkedIn by creating a rank and file system for employees.
Braverman began to think about the idea and called out Alberto Scherb, former angel investor in his first business. Soon after that, Braverman began coding and launched the product in July 2024.
Its fledgling product attracts 20,000 users, and after receiving feedback from customers and their angel investors, Braverman realized that he could tweak the technology for potentially large use cases. “We quickly realized there was a lot of demand for such a solution,” he said.
Currently, HackerPulse is targeting companies with large engineering teams and currently focuses on technology, manufacturing and logistics. The startup then has a handful of enterprise customers, including Preply, CoverFlex and DiscoverCars.
Demand is strong, according to Braverman, and behind the scenes, HackerPulse recently raised $1.5 million from Seed Round, led by Altair Capital, bringing participation from the Antler and DVC Fund. The company also raised capital from many angel investors who are welcomed by companies such as Uber, CloudFlare, and Google.
Of course, this is not a new problem that companies are trying to solve. Jellyfish raises more than $110 million in venture funding to do something similar for one. Some companies are also building their own internal tools.
Still, Braverman believes Hackerpulse is focused on engineers, and visibility is a better option. “We're looking at how our teams behave better, and we're trying to optimize our work across the team instead of providing reporting and report-based tools, which is why we're differentiating them from them,” he said.
After closing this funding round, the company's main goal is to drive sales and develop more product features into the line.
“We want to reach millions of ARRs before we do Series A,” Braverman said. “Now we are particularly focused on expanding our customer base, getting feedback from people who are actually using our products, and getting to the point where we feel comfortable moving in the next league.”