Startup of the Day: Swarmia, a Finnish tool for boosting team productivity through workflow insights

Swarmia, founded in 2019 by former Smartly.io product lead Otto Hilska, is a Helsinki‑based engineering‑efficiency platform. The startup has recently closed a €10 million Series A round co‑led by DIG Ventures and Karma Ventures, with participation from Alven, Lifeline Ventures and prominent angels such as Romain Huët (OpenAI) and Cal Henderson (Slack).

In the Startup of the Day column, Swarmia’s team shares more details about the startup’s idea, its product, and future plans. 

The Startup of the Day column on AIN is dedicated to tech projects from all sectors that originate from the CEE countries. If you would like to introduce your project, please fill in the questionnaire.

Tell us about your startup. How does it work?

Swarmia is a software engineering intelligence platform that combines data from the tools software engineering organizations use (source code hosting systems, issue trackers, etc.). Instead of only serving dashboards to engineering leaders and teams, Swarmia also automatically recognizes patterns in the data and surfaces those as proactive signals to customers. You can also use Swarmia to run developer experience surveys and combine the results with the system metrics in Swarmia.

How did you come up with the startup’s idea? What was the reason/motivation behind it?

Before Swarmia, Otto was Chief Product Officer at Smartly.io. His organization (product & engineering) was around 100 people, and as with any fast-growing startup, there were some growing pains. He noticed that things that used to be super quick started taking forever to get done, but nobody could really put their finger on why.

The reality is that this happens naturally and automatically as complexity grows — and after speaking with dozens of engineering leaders, it became clear that this was a universal problem. So that’s what we help engineering organizations solve with Swarmia: uncovering their bottlenecks and helping teams build healthy, productive ways of working.

How long did it take to reach the prototype or MVP? What did you encounter?

From the start, we worked closely with a handful of pilot customers to build a product that would be truly useful for them. Partnering with modern engineering organizations like Gorgias and Smartly.io gave us the opportunity to solve the problems these fast-growing scaleups were facing in their engineering organizations. Since then, we’ve also started expanding up-market to the enterprise segment, but that happened only once we had established a product-market fit with the startups and mid-market companies.

When exactly did you launch your product? Or when the launch is planned?

Swarmia was founded in November 2019 and officially launched to general availability in 2021.

Tell us about the stratup’s business model. How do you monetize your product?

We sell the product to smaller companies through self-service and to larger organizations via our sales team. Pricing is based on the number of software engineers in the organization.

What are your target markets and consumers?

We’re proud to serve engineering organizations of all sizes — from startups like Lovable and Superhuman, scaleups like Miro and Docker, all the way to Fortune 500s. Most of our customers are currently in North America and Europe.

If the startup has already launched the product, what are the results: metrics, income, or any clear indicators that can be evaluated.

We unfortunately can’t share our revenue numbers but we’re growing fast and already have some of the world’s best software organizations as customers, including Docker, Miro, and Webflow.

What about your team? How many people are working in the startup? If you’re looking for new employees, indicate whom exactly.

We currently have a team of ~50 people: finance, product, engineering, marketing, as well as some sales & customer success in Finland and sales & customer success as well as the CEO in the US. We’re currently hiring across engineering, sales, and customer success.

Have you already raised any investments? Provide us with more details on each funding round: the amount, investors, the purpose of the investment.

We recently raised a €10M Series A led by DIG Ventures and Karma Ventures, which was also joined by some notable angel investors, including Cal Henderson (former CTO of Slack) and Romain Huët (Head of Developer Experience at OpenAI).

In 2021, we raised a €7M Seed round, led by Alven and Lifeline Ventures.

What’s next? Tell us about your future plans.

This year, we’re focusing on building new integrations, using AI to automate tedious and non-value adding tasks like categorizing work or summarizing survey results, and expanding our enterprise offering. 

Read more: Read more: Swarmia raised €10M to power the future of engineering productivity