Latest funding round supports the company’s evolution from a “plug-in” to a “platform” used to make software development a collaborative experience across the organization
Zenhub, the leading project management solution for software teams, announced it has raised $10 million in its Series A funding round. Led by Yaletown Partners, with support from BMO Capital Partners and existing investors BDC Capital, this funding will be used to expand the use of Zenhub’s project management platform beyond technical teams using GitHub. To support its “plug-in” to “platform” evolution, Zenhub is also announcing the launch of Zenhub Issues—a brand new issue management experience to enable internal and external stakeholders to create and collaborate on tasks with their technical teams.
“ZenHub built its reputation by being an efficient and painless way to get best practices for agile development running within software teams,” said Michael Sfalcin, principal at Yaletown Partners. “With the expansion of the platform, Zenhub continues to drive that efficiency in dev teams but now also enables visibility into the code base for non-technical employees, and that’s what got us most excited about partnering with them. It’s our view that a company’s code base is the nucleus around which most modern organizations revolve, and because of that, Zenhub is in a great position to deliver a ton of value to its customers with its new platform.”
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As software has become mission critical to almost every modern organization, more stakeholders than ever are now involved in the process of developing software and bringing that software to market. “Software development is increasingly becoming a team sport,” said Tyler Gaffney, Zenhub’s CEO. “Unfortunately, teams typically find themselves working in silos when it comes to the tools they use to plan and track work. The driving force behind our platform vision is to break down these silos and provide a solution that every stakeholder, whether internal or external, can rely on to understand the progress of software projects.”
Zenhub got its start in 2015 as one of the first solutions to make it possible for software teams to manage projects entirely within GitHub. However, while GitHub remains a natural place for developers to work, it’s often viewed as an unapproachable platform for non-technical team members and external collaborators. As more and more of these non-technical stakeholders become involved in the development process, this represents a significant challenge for organizations. At the same time, organizations are becoming increasingly more security conscious and leaders are significantly limiting who has access to GitHub.
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Zenhub Issues, a new issue management experience launching in Zenhub today, solves both of these challenges by allowing non-technical users to create issues, tasks, and track projects in Zenhub without requiring a GitHub account. As a result, organizations realize the following benefits:
- Enhanced security: Non-technical team members no longer have to be given access to GitHub which limits the number of team members with read or write access to code.
- Cost savings: Organizations no longer need to pay for GitHub licenses for non-technical team members to be able to collaborate with their development teams in Zenhub.
- External collaboration: Clients, customers, and contractors can be given access to Zenhub Issues without needing access to the underlying GitHub repos.
- Tool consolidation: Organizations no longer need to maintain separate project and product management solutions for different internal teams.
While enhanced security, cost savings, and improved collaboration have long been key strategic objectives, they’ve recently taken on a new level of importance. The current macroeconomic environment has forced many organizations to operate lean, reduce spend, and figure out ways to increase output without increasing headcount. Now more than ever, organizations are looking for ways to make their teams more productive and improve collaboration. These circumstances have accelerated Zenhub’s journey to becoming a platform, and bring the productivity benefits of its solution beyond development teams working in GitHub.
“Zenhub is evolving their platform at the right time to meet business’ new software development requirements,” said Paul Nashawaty, principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Developers want to spend their time coding rather than in meetings providing updates to non-technical stakeholders. Additionally, most companies may not want to pay extra for GitHub licenses for these stakeholders, not to mention giving access to the GitHub ecosystem. Zenhub Issues aims to provide the ability to unlock more productivity so that development teams are able to do more with the resources they have today.”
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