Sourcegraph raises $50M Series C round led by Sequoia

At Sourcegraph, we bring universal code search to every developer and company so they can innovate faster. Our product helps customers such as Amazon, Atlassian, Lyft, PayPal, Uber, and Yelp create the software you use every day. Today we're announcing a $50M Series C round of funding led by Sequoia. Andrew Reed from Sequoia will join our board. All major existing investors (Goldcrest, Craft, Redpoint, and Felicis) also participated.

Why raise? How will this $50M help developers?

We didn't need to raise money. Our customer count and revenue are growing 4x year-over-year, we've never lost an enterprise customer, and we still have all of our Series B cash in the bank ($26M, even before this additional $50M).

But having Sequoia on our side and raising $50M lets us invest in big new projects that will make universal code search better and more helpful:

• Sourcegraph Cloud for private code: Right now, all of our customers run Sourcegraph self-hosted, but there's a ton of demand (especially among large enterprises) for a cloud service. Making code search scalable and secure on the cloud is a lot of work, but we're building the team and taking the time to do it right (no ETA yet).
• Improved global public code search on Sourcegraph.com: We first built Sourcegraph for developers to use across their company's code, not globally across all code. It turns out those 2 scenarios initially called for quite different product and technical decisions. Now that we've built a solid business on the former, we can invest massively in global public code search. This means more devs will fall in love with code search (even if they aren't using it at their company yet and don't want to run it self-hosted).
• Enhancing Code Intelligence for 40+ languages: Code is a highly connected graph. You need to be able to search and explore definitions, references, implementations, documentation, and more—even across repositories and API boundaries. We already contribute language servers and indexers for many languages, in open source and based on LSIF, an open standard. We'll significantly increase our investment here (through hiring, contracting, and sponsorship) to bring every major language ⨉ build system up to the highest level of code intelligence support. This costs a lot for one language, let alone 40+, but we're now able to do it and bring the benefits to every developer (and every Sourcegraph customer).
• We're also nearing general availability for Batch Changes, which let you make large-scale code changes and refactors across many repositories.

Investing in these big projects means growing our team. (In fact, 86% of our expenses are for team compensation.) We're hiring for many roles on our global, all-remote team (join us!).

Why Sequoia?

Sequoia really understands the power of search and the power of developers. They were early investors in Google, a search tool that most people didn't know they needed until they tried it and then couldn't live without it (which many developers say is also true about code search). They were also one of the few VC backers of GitHub. Sequoia sees the same opportunity in Sourcegraph.

"Sourcegraph's Universal Code Search essentially serves as 'Google for developers,' empowering engineering teams to quickly traverse massive codebases and find and analyze the impact of specific lines of code. Sourcegraph is a must-have productivity tool for all developers and will become the system-of-intelligence for code."

— Andrew Reed, Partner, Sequoia

I've known Andrew Reed, the Sequoia partner who's joining our board, for 5 years. Over that time, I've grown to trust him a lot and have appreciated his help as we built Sourcegraph. We've been fortunate to have tremendously helpful board members and investors from day 0, and we're all really excited to welcome Andrew and Sequoia on board.

Our mission as an independent, universal company

Our mission at Sourcegraph is to eventually make it so everyone can code. A world where everyone, not just ~0.1% of the world population, can code will see faster and more broadly beneficial technological progress. Right now, advancing our mission means building universal code search to solve the problems caused by Big Code (massive codebases, huge teams, growing complexity, etc.) so that all of today's developers can code much more effectively.

As an independent, universal code search company, we're committed to integrating with every other vendor's products based solely on what our customers and users need. We help resist lock-in to one single big tech vendor's developer ecosystem by, for example, searching code across all code hosts. Avoiding a dev tool monoculture is necessary to avoid technological stagnation.

What's next

With Sequoia's help, we'll continue to grow Sourcegraph, expand awareness of the Big Code problem, and bring universal code search to more developers and companies. Thank you to all of our customers and users who have helped us get here!

(If you haven't yet tried Sourcegraph, try Sourcegraph now! It takes less than 5 minutes to set up and start searching your own code locally.)

About the author

Quinn Slack is the CEO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, the code intelligence platform for dev teams and making coding more accessible to more people. Prior to Sourcegraph, Quinn co-founded Blend Labs, an enterprise technology company dedicated to improving home lending and was an egineer at Palantir, where he created a technology platform to help two of the top five U.S. banks recover from the housing crisis. Quinn has a BS in Computer Science from Stanford, you can chat with him on Twitter @sqs.