Raleigh startup Allstacks, which thrived during the pandemic, raises $4M from investors

Raleigh startup Allstacks, a maker of tools that track the productivity of software development teams, has raised $4 million from investors after experiencing strong growth during the pandemic.

The funding, the company’s CEO Hersh Tapadia told The News & Observer, comes as the startup’s tools have become increasingly attractive to customers managing remote teams during the pandemic.

Allstacks helps companies monitor what has traditionally been hard to assess: which development projects are going to miss their deadlines and why.

The company’s software embeds into the varying tools that developers use to finish projects, and uses machine learning to determine what roadblocks are hindering them.

With so many companies trying to manage projects remotely, Allstacks’ insights became more important, Tapadia added, saying revenues grew 17 times larger than the previous year. This was especially true of larger companies that aren’t historically tech companies, he said, noting Allstacks added customers in the financial and retailing industries.

“If you think about who had the most to lose from the pandemic and from going to work from home, it’s these traditional companies that are reinventing themselves and learning how to become software companies,” he said.

By using Allstacks, Tapadia said, a retailer working on an e-commerce update could more confidently predict when it would be ready.

Tapadia said the growth wasn’t immediate during the pandemic. In the first few weeks of March 2020, the company’s only goal was to do its best to avoid layoffs. But a few months later — after companies had come to grips with the fact employees would be staying home for the foreseeable future — customer interest began to pick up again.

“That was really fertile ground for us,” Tapadia said.

Allstacks only shares a few of its customers publicly. One of them is nCino, the Wilmington-based financial technology company that went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange last year.

Matt Bressler, a principal at TDF Ventures, which recently invested in the startup, said Allstacks’ tools are important because unexpected delays can kill the momentum of companies.

“In building and investing in our own software companies, the TDF Ventures team has seen how unexpected engineering delays can slow a company’s growth,” he said in a statement. “Most organizations struggle to accurately predict those issues because the data sits uncorrelated across siloed tools. Allstacks figured out how to integrate and correlate the data and deliver actionable insights to software teams to help them avoid issues before they cause delays and hinder growth.”

Bressler said the most recent funding round should allow Allstacks to accelerate its growth even more.

Tapadia said that’s already happening. “The growth that we had in 2020 that took the whole year, we’ve done in the first half (of 2021),” he said. “We matched that sales growth, and we’re going to double that again.”

Tapadia said the new funding will be used to continue to build out its workforce, which is concentrated in downtown Raleigh and Austin, Texas.

Allstacks’ headquarters is on Fayetteville Street in downtown Raleigh. It moved into the office, which it shares with the internet-of-things startup Ndustrial, a few months before the pandemic sent all of its employees home.

Founded in 2017, Allstacks has received support from both NC IDEA, an organization that supports entrepreneurship across North Carolina, and Techstars Austin, a startup accelerator. It previously raised a $4 million seed round in late 2019, not long before the COVID-19 virus began spreading in the U.S.

The company will continue to use the office going forward — but Tapadia said Allstacks is also benefiting from the ability to recruit remote employees across the country.

The company entered 2021 with 16 employees, and has since grown to 25 after securing money from investors earlier this year. Tapadia said the team should reach 30 employees by the end of the year.

This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate