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Reviewpad, the platform that helps developers by automating the code review process, has raised a €1M pre-seed round.
The investment was led by Shilling VC with participation from angel investors Simon Brandhof and Freddy Mallet.
The new round brings the total raised to date to €1.53M. The latest funding will be used for R&D for further product development and new hires across engineering and marketing. Reviewpad will be working on new integrations to expand its user base, including supporting code reviews on Gitlab and integrations with issue systems such as Linear and Jira.
Founded in 2019 by Adriano Martins and Marcelo Sousa, Reviewpad was born out of the need to have better code review tools. Their “secret sauce” is the knowledge Marcelo Sousa has developed during his PhD at Oxford University.
Following the completion of his PhD, Sousa took on a scientific and technical leadership role at SonarSource, where he spearheaded the research and development of security analysers for SonarQube. Together with Adriano Martins, he realised they could adapt some of these techniques to help programmers review code.
The code review market brings $2.34B yearly revenue globally. In software development, the code review stage is one of the most disliked processes for any developer, but it is necessary as it captures human error in coding. It can take up to two weeks1 and often leads to inconsistent outcomes depending on the team member reviewing the code.
Reviewpad’s platform combines multiple artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, including an integration with ChatGPT to summarise and review pull requests. The platform leaves only essential tasks to the developers, reducing the merge time of code changes by 50 percent. Reviewpad is currently used daily by over 80 GitHub organisations, and customers include Channable, Open-BB and Vital.
Marcelo Sousa, CEO and Co-Founder of Reviewpad, said, “Pull requests can take anywhere from a few hours for small companies to weeks for large teams. Often these code reviews are made by the same people, and if they leave the company or team, there is a large knowledge gap to fill. With Reviewpad, we ensure that all code revisions can be used in the future, therefore maintaining the value and knowledge of every contribution while dramatically reducing the merge time.”
Marcelo continued, “The purpose of AI is to assist in speeding up the review process and to provide helpful information to developers, not to replace them. This is even more important nowadays as developers are starting to use AI to generate code. The importance of human code review will dramatically increase in the future.”
Pedro Ramalho Carlos, Partner at Shilling VC, said, “We believe that this innovative, ambitious and technical product can be accomplished by Reviewpad because of the founders’ combination of vision and experience. We’re excited to see how they will leverage their specific technologies and AI to make the CI/CD software development process even faster, more reliable and higher quality for agile teams globally”.
Angel investors Freddy Mallet and Simon Brandhof have been actively supporting Reviewpad in advisory and strategic roles. Mallet has been a Board Member since 2019 and joined Reviewpad as Chief Product Officer in March 2023.
“I’ve been supporting Reviewpad every step of their journey, and I see them going from strength to strength”, said Freddy Mallet, Chief Product Officer and Board Member at Reviewpad. Brandhof joined the company as a Board Member in September 2022. Both investors have a strong technical background, having advised on the board of several tech companies, including Shematic and have co-founded SonarSource, a unicorn company now valued at over $4B, a market leader in code quality tools.
Simon Brandhof, Angel Investor and Advisor to Reviewpad, commented, “Build, testing and code analysis domains have reached great maturity levels during the last decade. It’s now up to code reviews to fill the gap, thanks to Reviewpad. I’m convinced it solves the need for fluid and secure review workflows. Clearly, there is demand for this product from software teams.”
Reviewpad is currently available for developers on GitHub on a free open-source plan and a paid subscription of $8 per developer per month. The software offers next-generation pull requests that can reduce the average time to review code by half. With a team of 10, Reviewpad operates from Porto, Portugal, with an initial focus on fast-growth tech companies in Europe.