For years, startups have tried to fill various gaps in how enterprises operate to ostensibly improve processes, eliminate grunt work, and help managers identify and address where their teams are wasting time.
The latest to join this cohort is HackerPulse, which has built a platform that gives enterprises more information about what their engineering teams are doing so they can spot productivity bottlenecks and resolve inefficiencies.
The San Francisco-based company offers a dashboard that integrates with developers tools that engineers use, like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, in addition to tools like revenue markers or user analytics. HackerPulse then pulls all this information together to help team leaders see where and how their engineering teams are spending their time. The startup says its tool can also help them better build groups of engineers for specific projects.
HackerPulse’s co-founder and CEO, Gleb Braverman (pictured above, in the middle), says the tool isn’t meant to be used to track how many lines of code an engineer is writing — the platform can’t do that — so that leaders can trim headcount. Instead, he argues, its aim is to help managers figure out ways to make engineering teams work better.
“It’s very difficult to understand what exactly the engineering team is doing and where their time is focused,” Braverman said. “If there are bottlenecks, if engineers and teams spend a lot of time on meetings, or they actually have productive time where issues arise. Technically, all of this information is available, but in order to actually get it, you need to spend a lot of time.”
Braverman said his startup is engineer friendly because the platform was originally designed as a product for engineers to track their own progress, but then it morphed into an B2B solution due to enterprise demand.
HackerPulse is Braverman’s second startup. He was inspired to launch it after he listened to a podcast on which venture capitalist Bill Gurley, a general partner at Benchmark Capital, said he was surprised no one was looking to disrupt LinkedIn by creating a rank-and-file system for employees.
Braverman started thinking about that idea and called up Alberto Scherb, a former angel investor in his first business, Speakezee, which Braverman described as “Snapchat for voice.” Soon afterwards, Braverman started coding, and launched the product in July 2024.
That fledgling product went on to amass 20,000 users, and after getting feedback from customers and their angel investors, Braverman realized the tech could be tweaked for a potentially larger use case. “We quickly understood that there is a lot of demand for solutions like that,” he said.
Right now, HackerPulse targets companies with massive engineering teams and is currently focusing on telecom, manufacturing and logistics — areas where tech adoption has lagged other industries. The startup has since onboarded a handful of enterprise customers, which include Preply, Coverflex and DiscoverCars.
Demand has been strong, Braverman says, and on the back of that, HackerPulse recently raised $1.5 million in a seed round led by AlTalR Capital, with participation from Antler and DVC Fund. The company also raised capital from numerous angel investors that hail from companies like Uber, Cloudflare and Google, who had expertise in areas like go-to-market, pricing strategies and more.
Of course, this isn’t a new problem that companies have been trying to solve. Jellyfish, for one, has raised more than $110 million in venture funding to do something similar. And some companies build their own internal tools too.
Still, Braverman thinks HackerPulse’s focus on the engineers and visibility makes it a better option: “We differentiate from them because we are looking more into how teams operate, and we are trying to optimize work across teams, instead of offering like reports or report-based tooling based on your data,” he said.
After closing this funding round, the company’s main goal is to drive sales and develop more product features down the line.
“We want to get to the point where we have several millions in ARR before doing a Series A,” Braverman said. “Right now we are focused specifically on expanding our customer base, getting feedback from people who are actually using the product, and getting to the point where we feel comfortable toward moving in the next league.”
