New startup: Vijaye Raji, a tech vet who previously led Facebook’s 5,000-person engineering outpost in Seattle, is CEO and founder of Statsig, a Seattle-area company that just formed to help developers build and launch features quickly.
Statsig’s pitch: Raji spent a decade at Facebook and learned how it used internal development tools to streamline the way new features were tested and ultimately implemented. They include Gatekeeper, which lets developers build features visible to only a targeted set of users, and Deltoid, a visual map of how critical metrics are affected by new features.
Statsig wants to bring that power to everyone.
“Big companies shouldn’t be the only ones with such sophisticated tools — it should be liberated and made accessible and available to developers, data scientists, and product managers,” Raji wrote in a blog post.
What makes Statsig different: There are a few competitors already in the market, which Raji said is good for market validation. The company differentiates itself with a usage-based pricing system tied to a customer’s monthly active user count. It includes a free tier that makes it easy for developers to try out the software. Raji said he would divulge more of the secret sauce in future blog posts.
Raji’s background: His tenure at Facebook included stints as vice president of gaming and vice president of entertainment. Raji previously worked at Microsoft for nearly a decade and was a principal software design engineer.
Investor interest: The company did not disclose funding information but at least one venture capitalist — Madrona Venture Group Managing Director and former Microsoft exec S. “Soma” Somasegar — is a fan.
With the #beta of @statsigio, @VijayeRaji and team are off to delivering #featureflags #dynamicconfigs and the like for developers to #deliver faster while being #data driven – Congratulations Team @statsigio from @MadronaVentures
— S. Somasegar (@SSomasegar) March 30, 2021
What’s next: Statsig has a small team made up of former Facebook employees based in the Seattle region. It recently opened a beta version of its software and Raji said there has been a steady stream of sign-ups.
Facebook opened an engineering office in Seattle back in 2010 and employs more than 5,000 people in the area. Last year it paid $367.6 million to purchase a brand new 6-acre, 400,000 square-foot complex from REI at the new Spring District development in Bellevue, Wash., just east of Seattle.
