Milestone Secures $10M Funding to Align AI Innovations with ROI Goals
Generative AI has swiftly transformed the landscape of software development, serving as a vital tool for enhancing workflows. However, many companies find themselves struggling to track its usage effectively, let alone measure its return on investment. Enter Israeli startup Milestone, a company poised to bring clarity to this evolving realm with an innovative platform aimed at correlating AI utilization with key engineering metrics, including code quality.
A New Approach to Engineering Metrics
One of the hurdles companies face is providing Milestone access to their codebases—a leap of faith that raised eyebrows among investors initially. Nevertheless, this bold step has attracted substantial interest from clients like Kayak, Monday, and Sapiens. Thanks to a successful $10 million seed funding round—led by San Francisco-based venture firm Heavybit and the Israeli fund Hanaco Ventures—Milestone is on a promising trajectory.
Building Strong Connections
Interestingly, connections in the tech realm can often transcend borders. CEO and co-founder Liad Elidan, alongside Milestone’s CTO, Professor Stephen Barrett, had yet to meet face-to-face before they began their fundraising journey. While Elidan resided in Israel, Barrett taught computer science at Trinity College Dublin, where Elidan was once a student. Their collaboration on software projects over the years laid a robust foundation for founding Milestone.
Understanding the Impact of AI
Despite the geographical distance, Elidan and Barrett remained connected, sharing a vision to enhance engineering efficiency just as coding assistants began to take off. With tools like GitHub Copilot amassing over 20 million users, the question remains: how can companies gain insights into the effectiveness of these resources?
Milestone answers this pivotal question by focusing on four key pillars:
- Codebases
- Project Management Platforms
- Team Structure
- AI Code Generation Tools
This holistic approach helps companies gather actionable data, illuminating how various teams leverage AI and its impact on productivity.
Empowering Teams with Data
Armed with comprehensive analytics, managers are now better equipped to enhance productivity. For example, they can measure the speed of feature delivery and analyze whether recent bugs originated from AI-generated code. This insight fosters informed decision-making regarding AI tool implementation.
This significant data also provides Milestone with crucial insights into return on investment—the elusive metric that many enterprises seek to understand more deeply. Elidan shares that they have yet to encounter a client who feels that using Milestone did not yield benefits; instead, they’re eager to explore even more generative AI tools.
Adapting to Change
The rapid pace of generative AI adoption necessitates that Milestone remain agile amidst ongoing changes. As Elidan notes, “it used to be auto-completes, then it was chat, then it was agentic-based chat, and it keeps going.” This constant evolution ensures that the tools available to engineers will also shift.
With Professor Barrett’s academic background lending insight into this transformative landscape, he emphasizes the changing nature of engineering roles. “AI is essentially augmenting teams, allowing engineers to take on more managerial responsibilities,” he explains.
Strategic Partnerships for Success
To stay at the forefront of these advancements, Milestone has strategically partnered with key vendors, including GitHub, Augment Code, Qodo, Continue, and Atlassian. Atlassian, known for powering Jira, has even participated in this latest seed round through its venture arm.
A Focus on Enterprise Needs
The decision to focus on enterprise solutions was a deliberate move for Milestone, even leading them to turn away smaller prospective clients. While this choice was challenging, it provided clarity on their roadmap, emphasizing the need for features tailored to enterprise requirements. Elidan advises fellow founders to maintain focus, stating, “Milestone will not venture into measuring AI’s impact on marketing or other functions, even as we grow.”
In this fast-evolving world of technology, Milestone is not just navigating the landscape; they’re shaping it with a clear vision and commitment to excellence.
Ready to elevate your coding effectiveness through generative AI? Join the conversation and explore how tools like Milestone can revolutionize your engineering processes.
