LinearB is the leader in software delivery management solutions that enables engineering leaders to improve their team’s operational efficiency and align R&D investments to business goals. Pulse 2.0 interviewed LinearB co-founder Ori Keren to learn more about the company.
Ori Keren’s Background
Keren has always been interested in technology. But once he started working in it, his enthusiasm skyrocketed. Keren said:
“I started working as a developer and, of course, once you’ve been bitten by the tech bug, it’s hard to slow down — so I quickly worked my way up to help make an even greater impact in my organizations through development team lead and VP of engineering roles in burgeoning companies. I even helped lead two of those companies through $121 million and $293 million acquisitions by AT&T and Cisco, respectively.
As I progressed through the founding journey alongside others, I started to think I could do it, too — I knew I had what it takes to start my own company, one capable of solving one of the industry’s biggest problems. I’d known my now co-founder, Dan Lines, for years at that point, and we decided to take the leap together. The rest is history.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges has Keren faced in building the company? Keren acknowledged:
“The initial challenge came from building a company with a cofounder who was 5,000 miles away in California – I’m in Tel Aviv.
So many influential companies have their creation stories coming from a garage, a dorm room, or a coworking space, where the co-founders can work in sync from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed. In our case, I was going to bed while my cofounder was waking up.
This initial challenge actually really came to work to our advantage and is embedded into our philosophy in LinearB. We had to figure out the right way to work as a team — clear definition of responsibilities, clear work pipeline, clear handoff of work, and clear requests to others. It created quite a bit of independence for us as cofounders. These principles are embedded in our approach to how we try to improve the efficiency and software delivery pipelines of engineering orgs.”
Core Products
What are LinearB’s core products and features? Keren explained:
“LinearB is a software delivery management platform that ultimately helps engineering teams drive positive business outcomes. Our platform helps engineering leaders and their teams align their day-to-day work with larger business goals to make sure they’re making the most impact possible by benchmarking the metrics that matter, automating workflows and aligning R&D investments to business goals.”
Evolution Of LinearB’s Technology
How has LinearB’s technology evolved since launching? Keren noted:
“Well, we were initially providing our first customers with their engineering metrics in PDF form, so we’ve evolved quite a lot!
Our first mission was to provide engineering leaders with visibility into their teams’ workflows so they could: 1) Figure out how to improve their engineering pipeline; 2) Communicate with the business side of their org how engineering is impacting the entire company.
This is a dual mandate my cofounder and I both had in our previous companies, but we didn’t have the insights and tools we needed.
After LinearB established itself as the best way for engineering leaders to get the intelligence they need to improve efficiency and deliver results consistently, we were able to start looking into the most common hurdles and problems facing engineering teams — and help make individual devs’ lives easier.
These insights have allowed us to create tools to improve the real problems facing engineering teams and incorporate them into our platform. The first of which is gitStream, which works to automate away bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the code-review process. Our team continues to do these types of solution-driven innovations, just launching a new resource allocation dashboard to help make sure engineering resources are aligning with business goals.
This led LinearB to its current form as a software delivery management platform that truly unlocks engineering-led growth. And as we uncover better ways to facilitate software delivery, we build them and integrate them into the platform.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of LinearB’s most significant milestones? Keren cited:
“Dan and I founded LinearB in 2019, with quite a bit of early success in the space. When the pandemic hit in early 2020, the need for our platform skyrocketed as businesses accelerated their development plans to stay relevant in the highly digital world.
In 2022 we raised $50 million in Series B funding, allowing us to further our growth. From there, LinearB skyrocketed from 1,500 to 5,000 development teams adopting the platform — including teams at leading companies like BigID, Appcues, Drata, Cloudinary and ClickUp.
This year, we’ve focused on making some core updates to improve the software delivery process even further. These updates have extended the platform’s support of GitLab, Bitbucket and Microsoft Azure users and allowed engineering leaders to benchmark and measure their team’s performance, automate workflows across the software delivery lifecycle and quantify the ROI of their activities to business stakeholders.
Additionally, we recently released our 2023 Software Engineering Benchmarks Report, which provides engineering leaders a roadmap for creating an elite engineering team. For this report, we studied 2000+ dev teams across 64 countries to create data-backed industry standards from which engineering teams can benchmark their performance.”
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific customer success stories? Keren highlighted:
“One of my favorite customer success stories is with our good friends at FloSports. When they approached LinearB, FloSports wanted to significantly move the needle on their deployment frequency. However, they soon realized that LinearB’s additional metrics could empower their engineering team to understand and identify bottlenecks, thereby improving their engineering success as a whole.
Now, FloSports engineering leaders have completely transformed how their teams operate and how they report indicators of success to their senior leadership team and board. They can communicate engineering efficiency in a way that makes sense to non-technical leaders and shows the true impact their team is having.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is LinearB pursuing? Keren assessed:
“There isn’t consensus among the analyst community on the Total Addressable Market, as the category is relatively new, and required capabilities for vendors are changing rapidly. In my opinion, our TAM is actually endless and evergrowing as more and more businesses that use technology at their core are making decisions to invest in software delivery management.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates LinearB from its competition? Keren affirmed:
“LinearB is the only player in the space that answers the dual mandate that every engineering leader has to improve their engineering pipeline and communicate engineering’s impact on the business as a whole. It provides engineering managers with the most easy-to-use, flexible operational and finOps metrics to internally measure and externally communicate the state of the organization.
But our true differentiation is: whatever problems engineering managers and platform engineers see in their development pipeline, they can fix via our platform. We invested a great deal in a ‘continuous merge’ pipeline programming language with which they can write rules that will unlock bottlenecks and accelerate efficiency around the merge, CI and CD processes.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of LinearB’s future company goals? Keren pointed out:
“We are in a great position to be the platform that helps engineering organizations both measure and orchestrate their development workflows. Code is going to be written at the speed of AI and teams will need a way to control how it’s merged, tested and released, plus decide where and when to apply guardrails and human intelligence. We will help them do this.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics to discuss? Keren concluded:
“I’d love to hit home the importance of tracking the right metrics when it comes to engineering success. We all know and love DORA metrics, but we’re increasingly seeing that DORA metrics aren’t enough to provide engineering leaders with a full picture of what’s happening within their team to truly make improvements.
Our Software Engineering Benchmarks Report shines a light on the metrics that can work alongside DORA to deliver better context for engineering leaders — like pickup time, rework rate and planning accuracy — so they can create movement toward change. It also looks at where the most elite teams stack up against these key metrics, giving engineering teams a benchmark for success.”
