Key Points
- Milestone raised $10 million in a seed round led by Heavybit and Hanaco Ventures.
- Investors include Atlassian Ventures and angels such as Tom Preston‑Werner and John Donovan.
- The platform creates a “GenAI data lake” linking AI tool usage to engineering metrics.
- Enterprise customers like Kayak, Monday and Sapiens use Milestone to measure AI productivity.
- Milestone integrates with GitHub, Atlassian, Augment Code, Qodo and Continue.
- Founders Liad Elidan and Professor Stephen Barrett built the team remotely before fundraising.
- The company focuses exclusively on enterprise clients, declining smaller prospects.
Funding and Investor Support
Milestone announced a $10 million seed financing round. The round was led by San Francisco‑based venture firm Heavybit and Israeli fund Hanaco Ventures. Atlassian Ventures also participated, reflecting the company’s strategic partnership with the collaboration‑software provider. A roster of angel investors joined the round, including GitHub co‑founder Tom Preston‑Werner, former AT&T CEO John Donovan, Accenture senior tech advisor Paul Daugherty and former Datadog president Amit Agrawal.
Product Vision and Capabilities
Milestone positions itself as a “GenAI data lake” for software engineering teams. By ingesting data from four pillars—codebases, project‑management platforms, team structures and the code‑generation tools themselves—the platform correlates AI usage with key engineering metrics. This enables organizations to see which teams are using generative AI, assess its effect on feature‑delivery speed, determine whether recent bugs stem from AI‑generated code, and ultimately quantify the return on AI investment.
Team and Collaborative Foundations
The company’s leadership includes CEO and co‑founder Liad Elidan, who previously studied under Professor Stephen Barrett at Trinity College Dublin. Barrett, who remains based in Ireland, contributes academic expertise to the team. Notably, Elidan and Milestone’s chief technology officer had never met in person before the fundraising effort, highlighting the remote‑first nature of the startup’s early operations.
Enterprise Focus and Market Traction
Milestone has already secured enterprise customers such as Kayak, Monday and Sapiens. The startup deliberately targets larger organizations, even turning away smaller prospects to maintain an enterprise‑grade roadmap. Customers have reported that the platform helps them understand AI’s impact on productivity and that they are eager to expand their use of generative AI tools rather than curtail it.
Strategic Partnerships and Ecosystem Integration
Milestone integrates with a range of tools across the development stack, including GitHub, Atlassian’s suite, Augment Code, Qodo and Continue. These partnerships allow the platform to pull data from the environments where engineers work, ensuring comprehensive visibility into AI‑assisted development workflows.
Outlook
With a robust funding base, a clear enterprise focus, and a growing roster of high‑profile customers, Milestone aims to become the standard for measuring generative AI’s return on investment in software engineering. The company’s roadmap emphasizes deeper integrations, expanded analytics and continued support for the evolving AI landscape, from auto‑completes to agentic‑based chat interactions.
Source: techcrunch.com