Zenhub closes $10 million to make platform for managing software projects more accessible
Summary
Vancouver-based Zenhub has secured $10 million CAD in Series A financing led by Yaletown Partners to fuel its expansion beyond GitHub, as the startup looks to make software development more collaborative.Zenhubs project management and collaboration platform allows thousands of software teams to connect with non-technical people at organizations ranging from Dapper Labs to Adobe and NASA. To date, the startup has been reliant on software development hosting service GitHub as its primary point of integration.But after hearing from clients that non-technical employees wanted to connect with software teams without using GitHub given cost and security considerations, Zenhub co-founder Aaron Upright realized the need to evolve into more than just a GitHub plug-in.ZenHub plans to use its Series A capital to support its transition into a more broadly accessible platform for software project management, beginning with todays launch of its new Zenhub Issues product, which the company has been working on for the better part of a year.What were solving for here is the ability for developers and non-technical stakeholders inside or outside the organization to come together and collaborate with one central space, Upright told BetaKit in an interview.According to Upright, Zenhub is looking to do this in a way that works for developers, without requiring non-technical team members to actually use GitHub and be given access to the code.Zenhubs all-equity Series A round closed earlier this month. The Yaletown-led financing also saw support from fellow new investor BMO Capital Partners, which typically invests at the Series B stage, but Upright said has begun to lean into the developer tools space. Sfalcin told BetaKit that the firm was attracted to Zenhub for a few key reasons, including the startups commitment to putting developers first and the fact that Zenhub drives programming efficiency for customers.RELATED: Yaletown-backed software company Tasktop to be acquired by Texas-based PlanviewZenHub is at an inflection point, moving from plug-in to platform where the information/insights housed in a companys code repository can safely and securely be viewed by others in the organization to facilitate orchestration and coordination across the broader organization, said Sfalcin.Zenhub was founded in 2013 under Axiom Zen, a Vancouver-based innovation studio whose portfolio also includes Dapper Labs. That integration that we have with source code is really really powerful, he added.But Upright said there were some problems with Zenhubs previous approachnamely, that allowing non-technical folks to access codebase through GitHub is expensive, non-intuitive, and carries security risks.
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