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What do you call achieving more than 5x your signup goal for a product launch? We’d call it market demand! The Graphite team opened their waitlist this week to all engineers after several successful months in closed pilot, and, wow, people are interested. We’ve been fortunate enough to see the story unfold from its earliest days and are now happy to announce our seed investment in Graphite.
WHO: Founded by three college friends who had gone their own ways professionally before recombining forces to found Graphite, the team struck us from very early on as not just talented, but mission-driven. When we first met, Greg, Merrill, and Tomas had a long list of ideas for what their initial product could be, but were 100% focused on what the broader goal was: higher quality software.
WHAT: From their days working across a variety of high performing tech companies like Airbnb, Facebook, Google and Square, they had seen how various engineering teams approached code at scale. And their own startup experiences (plus those of their friends) helped them see there were tool gaps for modern development teams. They knew they wanted to close those gaps. To Graphite, software “quality” is a broad term that incorporates production speed, code quality, localization and internationalization, and reliability. We believe this is a company that can one day span all those areas of interest.
HOW: But you have to start somewhere, and the Graphite team picked an area close to their hearts: code review. Stacked changes (“stacked diffs”) was an approach that Facebook used internally and the Graphite team sought to recreate at their own company for their own internal development. But then they kept getting asked by friends for a version of the tool. And so it became their first product.
WHY: The Graphite team is excited by the growth in software engineering worldwide and the fact that it’s not just “technology companies” these days that write and adopt software. Every industry is becoming a consumer or creator of software and Graphite wants this code to be effective, reliable and high quality so that the engineers can spend more time building together and less time fixing.
If Graphite sounds like a product you’d like to use, or a company you’d like to join, you can sign up for their waitlist, follow along or join their Slack
.