With the recent announcement of $4.7 million in seed funding secured from Hyperplane Venture Capital and six other investor groups, North-Carolina-based predictive forecasting and risk management platform Allstacks is ready to grow its customer base of software development companies looking to focus on not just capabilities, but delivery and outcomes.
“It’s incredibly validating,” CEO Hersh Tapadia told Hypepotamus regarding the successful (and oversubscribed) investment round. “We’ve been quiet for a long time—somewhat intentionally—because our number-one focus was customers. The funding is kind of the realization of us finding that fit and getting traction to get us propelled out into the market, grow fast and capture this demand. It’s huge for us, and also highly enabling.”
An engineer by training, Tapadia grew up in Raleigh and holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University, and a biomedical grad degree from Duke. He calls himself a “serial startup guy,” who for the past 15 years has been either a cofounder or early employee at software development companies across several industries, from defense to medical devices, pharmaceuticals, energy and agtech.
He says his experience directing dev teams helped him identify various “pain points” in the process of completing projects.
Tapadia says he and cofounder Jeremy Freeman, a fellow software engineer, realized that by helping others how software development works, he could make a real difference for companies, and as a result, for their clients.
With Allstacks, which runs machine learning and AI models on tools that engineers use to build software, companies receive visibility into roadblocks in the development life cycle. They are then able to identify and mitigate risks, and discover solutions.
“We take a real outcomes-driven approach. We know that when you’re building a business, you’re making commitments to stakeholders, customers, sales teams and marketing organizations. And other people are relying on those commitments.”
He refers to the previous 10 years as “the decade of the developer,” and doesn’t hide his sensitivity to the difficulty of the job. But he says that’s why Allstacks was built: to be a “massive tool” to help manage different aspects of development tasks and enable them to be successful.
While data is obviously critical, Tapadia believes that outcomes, not metrics, help organizations align and focus on tracking. He says one particularly rewarding outcome was using Allstacks to show software developers how to advocate for themselves when requesting necessary changes to get the work done.
In that case, Allstacks was able to look at a client initiative and discovered a problem that made the case for hiring more palatable to the company’s leadership. “With our data, we could see that the product development team had a problem, where there weren’t enough people assigned to the totality of work. It looked innocuous at first, but with all the new work, things kept getting piled onto one person, so delivery kept slipping down. And we were able to see those patterns emerge, so we were able to get more developers on that team.”
Tapadia says Allstacks won’t seek additional capital in the near term. He plans to use the funds from this seed round to expand teams in their Raleigh offices and in Austin, Texas. “At the end of the day, we care about making our customers successful,” Tapadia says, “and we’re going to be able to do that better now.”
