What is the hardest thing to get right in software development? It is not the intellectual effort required to innovate, argue the founders of the Californian start-up Hatica, but the much more prosaic question of productivity. Far too often, development gets caught up in a spiral of inefficiency that slows time to market and slows growth, argues Hatica, which today announced a $3.7 million seed funding round.
The inspiration for Hatica lies in co-founder Naomi Chopra’s experience with software development at former employers Cisco and Uber; Chopra met the other co-founder of the company, Haritabh Singh, at the latter company. “I saw the problems developers face, and it’s not, as you might expect, about the difficulty of writing new code,” says Chopra. “It’s more about inefficiency.”
Simply put, the software development process gets stuck at key stages. A common problem is that a host of other bureaucratic and administrative tasks distract developers from their focus on coding. Another is that new code, once written, needs to be reviewed and tested, but few organizations devote sufficient resources to this. Alternatively, developers are often dragged into firefighting problems with products and services that have already been launched – often after hours when things break – leaving them with a lack of time and energy for innovation.
“According to some estimates, engineers spend only 30% of their time doing the job they should be doing: writing new code,” Chopra adds. “The other 70% of their time just disappears.”
Hatica’s solution is a productivity tool that can be connected to all other tools that developers use in their role. This includes traditional developer tools like Github and JIRA, as well as the collaboration tools teams and companies use to manage and communicate work.
Hatica extracts data from each of these tools and presents it in easy-to-read dashboards for managers and leaders. The idea is to make it much easier to identify the pain points in the software development workflow. Do developers only write code to make it wait forever for review? Do they spend more time in meetings or other tasks than coding? Are they constantly being pulled from new projects to solve problems with existing products?
Hatica founders Haritabh Singh and Naomi Chopra
“Once you can diagnose your blocks, you can start finding ways to solve them,” Chopra adds. The Hatica tool can also help here. For example, it can be set to alert a manager when a piece of code is not fetched for review within a certain time limit.
When used properly, Hatica’s tool should enable organizations to deploy their developers much more productively, reduce the cost of innovation and secure a faster path to value. Chopra references the examples of two clients: a real estate tech company that saw its developers’ continuous time to code increase by 55%, and a social media platform that saw its time to production accelerate by 50%.
Such success stories support the rapid growth at Hatica, which is currently deployed by more than 100 technical teams with more than 20,000 individual developers. Launched just last summer, Hatica has quickly gained popularity, especially in the US and India.
Chopra is hopeful that the latest fundraising will now help it scale at a rapid pace. The company has raised $3.7 million in seed funding in a round led by Surge, Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia’s rapid scale-up program. Existing investor Kae Capital also participated and the round was also supported by angel investors with backgrounds at companies such as Google, Uber, Twitter, Okta and Notion.
The money will largely be used to build Hatica’s technical capacity, although the company also plans further investments in sales and marketing.
