Reviewpad, a Porto, Portugal-based platform that automates the code review process, has recently raised a pre-seed round of €1M. The investment was led by Shilling VC (also backed Coverflex and Circular) with participation from angel investors Simon Brandhof and Freddy Mallet.
With this round, the total amount raised by Reviewpad to date has reached €1.53M.
How will the funding be used?
This latest round of funding will be used for further product development, as well as new hires in all areas. Among the integrations Reviewpad plans to develop are support for code reviews on Gitlab and integrations with issue management systems such as Linear and Jira.
Birth of Reviewpad
Founded in 2019 by Adriano Martins and Marcelo Sousa, Reviewpad was born out of the need for better code review tools. The founders met while studying Computer Science at Minho University in 2006 and have known each other for 15 years. They considered starting their own company in 2010, but opportunities for entrepreneurship in Porto were scarce at the time.
Marcelo was doing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Oxford, and Adriano was living in Amsterdam, so their paths went in different directions. However, in 2019, Marcelo had already gained experience in the static analysis field and developed the idea for Reviewpad.
Adriano was looking for other opportunities while working at the European Parliament in Brussels, and together they decided to move back to Porto and start Reviewpad.
The “secret sauce”
Their “secret sauce” is the knowledge Marcelo Sousa has developed during his Ph.D. at Oxford University. Following the completion of his Ph.D., Sousa took on a scientific and technical leadership role at SonarSource, where he spearheaded the research and development of security analysers for SonarQube.
Together with Adriano Martins, he realised they could adapt some of these techniques to help programmers review code. Initially, the founders started by developing technology to power code navigation similar to companies like Sourcegraph.
However, they quickly realised they wanted to build a new way to review code, which led them to develop a new code review interface to compete directly with GitHub and GitLab code review experience.
After launching that product and receiving user feedback, they understood how hard it is for developers to change their habits and introduce a new tool to a development team.
At the same time, the founders understood how inefficient the code review process is on GitHub and had all the technical foundations to dramatically automate it with their Miros platform.
What does Reviewpad do?
Reviewpad’s platform combines multiple artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, including integration with ChatGPT to summarise and review pull requests. The platform leaves only essential tasks to the developers, reducing the merge time of code changes by 50 percent.
Reviewpad is currently used daily by over 80 GitHub organisations, and customers include Channable, Open-BB, and Vital.
Challenges
According to Marcelo Sousa, CEO and Co-Founder of Reviewpad, the Reviewpad team faced its first significant challenge when COVID-19 hit soon after they started the company.
Being first-time founders of a tech company in the middle of a global pandemic made it difficult to iterate quickly on the first versions of the product.
As first-time founders, another challenge has been navigating the investment ecosystem. SaaS developer tools are interesting to many VCs, but it was not always easy to understand which VCs were serious about a potential investment.
Fortunately, Marcelo and Adriano had great mentors like Fred Oliveira (VP of Engineering at Capital Factory) and Jaime Jorge (CEO of Codacy) who helped them stay focused when it comes to fundraising.
Currently, the company employs around ten people and out of that three are women on the team, and two team members are working remotely (one from France and another one from Ethiopia).
Reviewpad is currently available for developers on GitHub on a free open-source plan and a paid subscription of $8 per developer per month.
Pedro Ramalho Carlos, Partner at Shilling VC, said, “We believe that this innovative, ambitious, and technical product can be accomplished by Reviewpad because the founders combine vision and experience. We’re excited to see how they will leverage their specific technologies and AI to make the CI/CD software development process even faster, more reliable, and higher quality for agile teams globally”.
Simon Brandhof, Angel Investor and Advisor to Reviewpad, commented, “Build, testing, and code analysis domains have reached great maturity levels during the last decade. It’s now up to code reviews to fill the gap, thanks to Reviewpad. I’m convinced it solves the need for fluid and secure review workflows. There is demand for this product from software teams.”
