Swimm raises $27.6 Million to repair developers’ love/hate relationship with documentation

Swimm, the company making continuous documentation an integral part of the development lifecycle, today announced a $27.6 million Series A funding round to enable engineering teams to create documentation that is always up to date. The round, which brings Swimm’s total funding to $33.3 million, was led by New York-based global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners, with participation from Dawn Capital, alongside existing seed investors Pitango First and TAU Ventures. With this latest investment, the company also announced the launch of an open beta, which grants free access to any team that wants to use Swimm’s platform to create continuous documentation and promote development velocity and agility.

According to a recent Google report, teams with high-quality documentation saw their software delivery and operational performance improve by a factor of 2.4 — yet only 1 in 4 developers reported having access to documentation of this caliber. Using Swimm’s technology, teams can radically simplify the process of creating, finding and maintaining relevant documentation as part of the existing development workflows. Swimm makes sure that documentation is always up-to-date by introducing “live” code snippets that auto-sync with changes to the codebase. The platform also gives developers access to documentation like tutorials, guides and walkthroughs in a secure Web App — or right inside their current development environment, with support for VS code and JetBrains IDEs — and provides a Github app that automatically verifies that documents are up to date, making Swimm’s integration in the development cycle seamless.

“Swimm is redefining developers’ relationship with documentation, transforming it from a tedious task that requires heavy investment and rarely pays off, into a seamless part of the CI process,” said Oren Toledano, CEO and Co-founder of Swimm. “By allowing developers to effortlessly create and maintain documentation, as well as improving discoverability, Swimm becomes an impactful and powerful tool for teams.”

The current unprecedented influx of capital is allowing startups to quickly scale their teams, with many companies doubling their headcount in a year. This growth introduces a host of challenges related to onboarding, communication and knowledge sharing between team members. Hyper-growth cloud security unicorn Orca Security turned to Swimm to address these challenges while raising more than $500 million and growing their team to over 200 employees in recent months. “Swimm has been a game-changer for us while we experienced exponential growth over the past year,” said Avi Shua, CEO of Orca Security. “The platform has been embraced by our development team, who love it and have incorporated it into their daily workflow. Swimm helped ensure faster and more efficient onboarding for new developers by improving knowledge sharing across the team, and also boosted productivity and led to better engineering processes.”

“We are happy to help teams of all sizes share knowledge more efficiently. Whether it’s Unicorns, like Orca Security, up and coming startups or open source projects, all have a need for code-related information to flow freely across the team and organization,” said Omer Rosenbaum, CTO and Co-founder of Swimm. “Swimm enables developers to understand code and quickly contribute to the team. By lowering entry barriers, we can allow a more diverse group of individuals with different backgrounds and levels of experience to take part and make coding more inclusive in the process.”

“Swimm’s rapid growth and widespread adoption by small startups and high growth ScaleUps alike is a testament to the extraordinary value customers are getting from their highly differentiated product,” said Lonne Jaffe, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “Swimm has created a new category — continuous documentation — that addresses a productivity and collaboration pain point that has existed for software developers for decades, and then goes beyond. Swimm is a rocket ship, and we‘re excited to be on board.”

“Last year, over $180 billion was invested in private cloud companies—a 10x increase since 2010. Behind every venture dollar invested, is an engineering team, large or small, struggling with out-of-date, messy documentation which lives outside of the development workflow,” Said Evgenia Plotnikova, General Partner at Dawn. “With Swimm, Oren, Omer, Gilad and Tom have built a unique product which has turned the developer’s headache into a business’ competitive advantage. We are thrilled to partner with them on this journey and to welcome more teams to Swimm’s beta.”