Spin-out company Semmle secures $8M from Accel Partners

Semmle, which provides a business analytics platform to manage the software development process, announces an $8 million series A investment, led by Accel Partners, to accelerate further growth and product development.

Founded by Oege de Moor, a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford, and staffed by a team of exceptional engineers from the world’s top universities, the Semmle platform today helps a range of international clients such as Citi, Credit Suisse, NASA and Dell manage tens of thousands of developers and billions of lines of code.

In-house software development is critical to the survival of nearly every large company. Large enterprises in industries as varied as space exploration and financial services must manage thousands of internal and external developers across a wide range of projects, often with significant cost over-runs and business disruptions. In 2011, the Harvard Business Review reported that on average IT projects overrun budgeted costs by 27%, with one in six being a “black swan,” overrunning by 200% or more. Black swans routinely cost the jobs of top management, and have sunk whole corporations. Overruns large and small happen when management cannot see the true state of the project, with problems only becoming apparent when it is too late to fix them. As a result, enterprises are seeking a way to manage this complexity by adopting a data-driven approach to software development.

Semmle provides an analytics platform that allows several layers of decision-makers within an enterprise to analyse and manage the software development process, with the goal of substantially reducing production and maintenance costs. The company’s platform serves both technical and strategic decision making by analysing software code quality in the context of other data such as development cost, issue tickets, test coverage and version history. Using Semmle analysis, a developer might find a critical bug to fix in the code; a manager might track the performance of individual developers to see the effects of a new training program; and an executive might compare the quality and cost of in-house projects against outsourced projects. The platform allows software development to be guided by data rather than intuition.

The company will use the investment to accelerate growth and product innovation. This includes the establishment of a permanent US office and development of a cloud product to provide access to its platform to a wider range of companies.

“Software development is mission critical for so many companies, but it’s impossible to understand the health of a software project without the right tools. The Semmle platform is the only product that provides comprehensive, actionable feedback about project health to everyone involved in the process, from developers to executives,” de Moor said. “We are excited to work with the team at Accel – who have tremendous experience both in software tools and business intelligence – to transform the software industry.”

Kevin Comolli, Partner at Accel Partners, will join the board. He said: “Semmle’s impressive technical team has built a remarkable product with a unique breadth of functionality and significant commercial momentum. We look forward to supporting the company in its mission to bring data-driven transparency to the software development process.”