GitStart, Software Development Platform Raises $5 Million To Empower Tech Companies to Employ Diverse Junior Engineers Worldwide
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GitStart – Led by Neo and notable CTOs, the round will support inclusive hiring from underserved candidate pools
May 12 – GitStart has raised a $5M seed round to help understaffed tech teams distribute coding tasks to junior engineers worldwide. Neo led the round alongside Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, Google VP Parisa Tabriz, Andela founder Iyinola Aboyeji, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, former CTO Mike Schroepfer, and many others.
The GitStart talent marketplace empowers global engineers to overcome challenges such as different time zones, cultural barriers, and gender discrepancies. Its peer-review system rewards the best work and helps employers get quality code quickly.
Other notable investors in the round include Airbnb co-founder Nate Blecharczyk, Instagram VP Maria Zhang, Circle CTO Li Fan and VP Yongsheng Wu, Robinhood VP Surabhi Gupta, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, GitHub technical advisor Omoju Miller, Gigster founder Debo Olaosebikan, BloomTech founder Austen Allred, and Replit CEO Amjad Masad.
The story of GitStart started with its founder’s struggles: “I lost 6 years of my life getting rejected from every job I applied to – until Microsoft took a bet on me. When I started recruiting for my team as a staff engineer, I quickly realized there were millions of talented engineers around the world, but we couldn’t hire them because – like me – they were born in the wrong country. GitStart is changing that.” – Hamza Zia, founder and CEO of GitStart.
GitStart’s innovation is twofold.
First, GitStart abstracts engineers behind a bot. GitStart clients assign coding tasks and receive pull requests. This removes all issues of cultural (mis)fit, hard to understand accent, and most important, discrimination. Community Associate Emily Luo shares: “One of our developers got rejected 4 times from his dream company without even being given the chance to interview. It turns out this company became a GitStart client… and he’s now the number one contributor on their codebase.” Another benefit of this approach is that it enforces asynchronous work, which opens the door for promising engineers from all time zones. Note that 7/8th of humanity lives outside of USA time zones.
Many companies, like Netflix, have stopped hiring juniors because juniors consume their bottleneck resource: senior engineers’ time. GitStart’s second innovation is to make juniors autonomous. The bot automatically sends the same task to multiple junior engineers and has them review each other until the code is perfect. Seniors save review time, and juniors get to work on production codebases years before they could do it on their own.
This helps accelerate engineering teams from top organizations such as SourceGraph and the United Nations. The CTO of a US fintech shares: “GitStart is our secret weapon. It enabled two of our senior engineers to build a technology now valued nine figures in just four months. The Bot enables them to leverage 35+ engineers concurrently. This level of scalability is above anything I’ve seen before”
It also creates opportunities for promising talents from all around the world to shine. Ali Partovi, CEO of Neo comments: “Instead of emigrating to find jobs, imagine working from wherever. With Gitstart, people prosper based on performance, not place.”
A Nigerian alumnus confirms: “GitStart gave me a shot – it got my foot in the door and help me grow. I’m now making six figures working for Amazon.”
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Junior engineers: get paid to grow your career by contributing to production codebases and join a Community of like-minded people.
Senior engineers: turn your backlog into PRs and free time to focus on harder problems.
You care about narrowing the opportunity gap?
Consider joining the HQ team!
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