Hiphops is a London-based startup saving engineering teams resources by automating the tremendous manual effort that exists between writing code and getting it live. Now, the British startup has announced to have emerged from the stealth with a $650k pre-seed raise at a $3.5M valuation.
This pre-seed round was co-led by firstminute Capital and investment heavyweights Seedcamp. Further, it also saw participation from Tiny VC, RLC Ventures and prominent angel investors Matt Robinson, Jack Kleeman and Will Neale.
Speeding up the release time of coded projects
“Despite the massive improvements and efficiencies in coding we’ve seen over the past few years, once code is finished there’s still a painful amount of effort required before it’s in the customers’ hands,” explains Tom Manterfield, Hiphops’ CEO.
Hiphops is addressing the huge pain point in software development of releasing code. Far too often, code that takes days to write can end up taking weeks or even months to go live due to hectic release processes, particularly for very regulated industries such as banking. Hiphops is a low-code SaaS that automates reviews, publishes release notes and crucially helps understand the impact of a software change to save time and money across a tech business.
This problem was commonly encountered by the founding team throughout their career building multi-million-dollar tech companies. Far too often, to finalise the software development process, they repeatedly ran into this huge bottleneck.
The software automatically tracks, analyses, categorises and automates all software releases enabled by its out-of-the-box automation, 97% accurate ML pipeline and ability to operate with only access to metadata. The result is that admins can get features faster into customers’ hands without sacrificing control or quality. Hiphops’ design meets the security requirements of even the strictest regulated industries such as Fintech, Insurtech and Crypto, bragging among its first users a US fintech unicorn and a multinational insurer.
The startup was founded by Manterfield alongside partners Yang Li and Michelle Arnold. Li’s past successes include an IPO and two acquisitions. He also worked as Ziglu’s CGO where he successfully helped Ziglu grow to 100k customers in its first year and secure £20M in funding. Yang is listed among the 2021 Forbes 30 under 30 as well. Arnold successfully listed a Bank on the Nasdaq and has led and scaled sales, communications and operations in successful startups. She served as Ziglu’s COO at launch and featured among the leadership of the now Robinhood-acquired company.
“We invest in founders who are committed to building a solution to a problem that they’ve lived and that so the Hiphops team and story resonated with us. Freeing tech teams from manual effort means that more tech can be delivered faster and with more control. HipHops can define a whole new category in software development.” remarked Michael Stothard of firstminute capital.
