DEVOPSdigest

Edify, a Techstars portfolio company, has raised 1.635M out of what could be a $2M seed round.

The company, founded in 2020 by CEO Kristen Gallagher, is embracing the future of work by streamlining the technical onboarding process that engineers need to get up to speed and productive in a new work environment. Edify aims to solve one of the most critical issues in the engineering industry — remote technical onboarding. The closure of this funding round accompanies growth within the company as Edify appoints Kate Farmer as CTO and seeks new hires in engineering and developer advocacy.

The 5-month fundraising period marks a first for Edify, which bootstrapped the initial beta before building a client base. The $1.635M was raised from several investors to fund engineering and product development efforts, including adding natural language processing to the bot along with enhanced usability and management capabilities for all customers.

The fundraising round, led by Seattle-based venture firm Flying Fish Ventures, focused on Edify's AI and ML capabilities. They are joined by Atlassian Ventures (creators developer-centric tools Confluence and Jira), Portland Seed Fund, and angel investors Mat Ellis (founder of Cloudability), Luke Kanies (founder of Puppet and Clickety), Leigh Honeywell (founder of Tall Poppy), and several others active in the technology community.

"The life of a developer can always improve with better tooling. DevOps helped show that progress is not about the tools, it's about advancing the people and culture around them," notes investor Luke Kaines. "Edify is a great new tool because it targets people and their success directly."

Edify's product eddy is designed to accelerate onboarding for new engineers with an interactive interface, nested within Slack today and Microsoft teams soon. With eddy, companies can streamline learning, shorten time to value for new hires and minimize distractions by guiding new engineers through onboarding tasks, and scheduling team introductions to accelerate learning and team integration. With eddy, employers can cut down the onboarding process from 7 months to 30 days with a customized onboarding plan while increasing human connection.

Following the company's January announcement joining the Techstars Seattle 2021 class, Edify is prepared for rapid growth.