Macroscope raises $30M to speed up software projects with AI

Macroscope Inc., a startup working to make developers and project managers more productive, today announced that it has closed a $30 million early-stage funding round.

Lightspeed led the Series A investment. Macroscope previously raised a $10 million seed round that included the participation of Alphabet Inc.’s GV startup fund, Thrive Capital and Adverb.

Macroscope was founded in 2023 by Kayvon Beykpour and Joseph Bernstein, who had previously created the Periscope live streaming platform. Twitter Inc. acquired Periscope in 2015 through a transaction reportedly valued at $100 million. Macroscope’s third founder, Rob Bishop, earlier established an artificial intelligence startup called Magic that was likewise acquired by Twitter.

Macroscope provides an AI platform that focuses on two main use cases. The first is helping developers find and fix bugs in their code faster. According to the company, its platform’s other focus is making it easier for project managers to understand how software development initiatives are coming along.

Developers can set up Macroscope in a few seconds by connecting it to their GitHub repositories. From there, the company maps out the code in the repositories by analyzing their abstract syntax trees, or ASTs. An AST is a file that provides a high-level description of what computing operations an application performs, when and on what data.

New code can be added to software projects through a mechanism known as a pull request. Such requests invite a colleague to review the code for issues before it’s rolled out to production. According to Macroscope, the platform automatically scans pull requests for bugs and generates a natural language explanation of the issues it finds. It can also suggest a fix.

For the reviewers tasked with validating a pull request, Macroscope highlights the specific section of a code submission where they should start reading. Understanding an application component sometimes requires reviewers to study adjacent code snippets first.

Ahead of today’s funding announcement, Macroscope compared its platform with several competing AI bug detection tools. The company used a custom benchmark with more than 100 bug detection tasks. Macroscope says its platform won the top spot by completing 48% of the tasks correctly.

Alongside its bug detection features, the company provides project tracking tools for managers and nontechnical workers. A dashboard visualizes how much time developers spent on each major code update to an application. It also displays AI-generated update summaries, the top contributors to a project and other data.

Users can enrich the information the platform collects from code repositories by connecting it to project management tools such as Jira. In many cases, such tools contain details about not only past software updates but also future enhancements. A Slack integration enables Macroscope to answer user questions in the collaboration service’s interface.

The company will use the proceeds from its funding round to enhance its platform. “Looking forward, Macroscope will weave together a richer view of how work gets done across your company—and evolve from understanding to directly helping build your product,” Chief Executive Beykpour wrote in a blog post today.

Image: Macroscope