Merico, a startup that gives companies deeper insights into their developers’ productivity and code quality, today announced that it has raised a $4.1 million seed round led by GGV Capital, with participation from Legend Star and previous investor Polychain Capital. The company was originally funded by the open source-centric firm OSS Capital.
“The mission of Merico is to empower every developer to build better and realize more value. We are excited that GGV Capital and our other investors see the importance of bringing more useful data to the software development process,” said Merico founder and CEO Jinglei Ren. “In today’s world, enabling remote contribution is more important than ever, and we at Merico are excited to continue our pursuit of bringing the most insightful and practical metrics to support both enterprise and open-source software teams.”
Merico head of business development Maxim Wheatley tells me that the company plans to use the new funding to enhance and expand its existing technology and marketing efforts. As a remote-first startup, Merico already has team members in the U.S., Brazil, France, Canada, India and China.
“In keeping with our roots and mission in open source, we will be focusing some of these new resources to engage more collaboratively with open-source foundations, contributors and maintainers,” he added.
The idea behind Merico was born out of two key observations, Wheatley said. First of all, the team wanted to create a better way to analyze developer productivity and the quality of the code they generate. Some companies still simply use the number of lines of code generated by a developer to allocate bonuses for their teams, for example, which isn’t a great metric by any means. In addition, the team also wanted to find ways to better allocate income and recognition to the community members of open-source projects based on the quality of their contributions.
The company’s tool is systems agnostic because it bases its analysis on the codebase and workflow tools instead of looking at lines of codes or commit counts, for example.
“Merico evaluates the actual code, in addition to related processes, and places productivity in the context of quality and impact,” said Merico CTO Hezheng Yin. “In this process, we evaluate impact leveraging dependency relationships and examine fundamental indicators of quality including bug density, redundancy, modularity, test-coverage, documentation-coverage, code-smell and more. By compiling these signals into a single point of truth, Merico can determine the quality and the productivity of a developer or a team in a manner that more accurately reflects the nature of the work.”
As of now, Merico supports code written in Java, JavaScript (Vue.js and React.js), TypeScript, Go, C, C++, Ruby and Python, with support for other languages coming later.
“Merico’s technology delivers the most advanced code analytics that we’ve seen on the market,” said GGV’s Jenny Lee. “With the Merico team, we saw an opportunity to empower the organizations of tomorrow with insight. In this era of remote transformation, there’s never been a more critical time to bring this visibility to the enterprise and to open source; we can’t wait to see how this technology drives innovation in both technology and management.”
