Behind the Investment: Jellyfish – Empowering Businesses with Data-Driven Visibility and Alignment

Are development teams working on the right things? Should we hire more engineers to accelerate roadmap execution? What percent of our budget is spent on roadmap?

While these questions are critical to the bottom line of any organization, their answers have historically been elusive. This has driven Insight to follow the Engineering Management Platform (EMP) space for many years. Through this, we’ve come to see Jellyfish as the first and only product to answer big-picture, strategic questions of resource management.

Several trends have propelled the emergence of EMPs. For one, with software continuing to eat the world, developers are seen as increasingly strategic to any organization’s business goals. Simultaneously, there has been a major proliferation of data sources, from project tracking to product management to team collaboration tools. This means that data on developer activity is available, albeit scattered, complex, and ever-changing across multiple sources. On top of all this, the increasing shift to remote work makes the need for visibility even more important.

Most EMPs have focused on code quality, individual performance, or team project management. Jellyfish stood out to us for its unique focus on answering big-picture, strategic questions. Specifically, the platform pulls existing data from tools like Jira and GitHub, generating reports and dashboards relevant to both engineering and non-engineering leaders alike. In contextualizing R&D signals with business outcomes, Jellyfish creates insights that business leaders can rely on.

Insight’s first conversation with CEO Andrew Lau was in the summer of 2019. While they were heads-down in only their second year of building Jellyfish, the entrepreneurship journey between Andrew and his co-founders Phil Braden and David Gourley started decades ago on the founding team of Endeca (which later exited to Oracle).

Believing in the team, product, and opportunity, we’re excited to be leading Jellyfish’s Series B alongside existing investors Accel and Wing. In the road ahead, Jellyfish will allow more and more companies of all shapes and sizes to answer questions that before seemed impenetrable.