Vijaye Raji, the former Facebook and Microsoft engineering leader, has raised $10.4 million in series A funding for a new startup by the name of Statsig that is developing novel ways to help developers more quickly and seamlessly roll out product features.
Sequoia Capital and Madrona Venture Group participated in the funding, along with a group of angel investors. The Kirkland, Wash.-based company declined to comment to GeekWire.
GeekWire reported on Statsig in April, noting that Raji came up with the idea after his work at Facebook where he and other developers used internal tools to quickly roll out features targeted to a specific set of users — so called “dogfooders” — before they were ready for prime time. That process, along with other tools at Facebook that allowed engineers to quickly run experiments on what features to implement, inspired Statsig.
The company’s tag line says a lot about the focus: Build now. Measure Fast. Ship Right!
“Having seen firsthand the power of these tools and how they enable a company like Facebook to move fast, I am convinced that we can bring that power to everyone,” Raji wrote in a blog post introducing the company in March. “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.”
At Facebook, Raji oversaw the company’s fast-growing engineering outpost in Seattle, an engineering center that has now grown to more than 7,000 employees. The Facebook office is now led by Rajeev Rajan, a 23 year Microsoft veteran who GeekWire profiled last month.
Statsig employed about a dozen employees as of last month, most of whom worked at Facebook. Other team members include Timothy Chan, a former Facebook gaming data scientist; Geunbae Lee, a former product designer in the gaming group at Facebook; and Rodrigo Romio, a former software engineer at Facebook and Microsoft.
S. “Soma” Somasegar, a partner at Madrona, said he’s worked with the founding team since it was founded in February and said they’ve been very agile in how they’ve built first versions of the product, which is true to their mission.
“If you look at sales and marketing and other functions in an organization there are tools and platforms that provide insights for these teams to understand and act upon,” Somasegar said in an email to GeekWire. “That has been missing in the software development space and Statsig is off to a great start to deliver a best-in-class solution to provide that single source of truth for all software development teams.”
TechCrunch first reported the news Thursday morning.
Other angel investors in the deal include: Aparna Chennapragada (CPO at Robinhood), Calvin French-Owen (co-founder of Segment), Dylan Field (CEO & co-founder at Figma), Fidji Simo (ex-Facebook and CEO at Instacart), Gokul Rajaram (product leader at DoorDash), Hadi Partovi (CEO and founder at Code.org), Jay Parikh (ex-VP at Facebook and co-CEO at Lacework), and Sriram Krishnan (ex-Twitter and general partner at a16z).
