Uplevel Emerges from Stealth with $7.5M Seed

Uplevel, a company that leverages both machine learning and organizational science to empower engineering effectiveness, today announced that it is launching with $7.5 million in seed venture funding from Norwest Venture Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and Voyager Capital. Created by a team of engineering, organizational science and marketing leaders, Uplevel analyzes daily data from messaging tools like Slack, collaboration tools like Jira, calendar tools like Office 365, and code repository tools like Github to provide teams with a holistic view and actionable insights to make engineering teams work more effectively. To date, ten companies, including Avalara, RedVentures, and D2iQ have implemented Uplevel to improve team effectiveness and health.

"At the executive level, the VP of engineering is under constant pressure to manage risk and deliver product, while also keeping retention and engagement high. But they are making many decisions on gut feeling alone without having access to the same depth of data as other functions such as sales and marketing," said Joe Levy, co-founder and CEO, Uplevel.

"At the team level, the nature of software engineering has evolved. Engineering teams are expected to continuously ship high quality code, while keeping up with customer requests. At the same time, developers are constantly interrupted with meetings and messages, while having to context switch between tasks and deal with unexpected fire drills," said Ravs Kaur, co-founder and CTO, Uplevel.

The company was born out of the exploration of organizational psychologist and entrepreneur David Youssefnia, Ph.D. and the winning concept from Dave Matthews' (of Microsoft, Hulu) 2017 hackathon. The two joined forces to incubate the idea at Madrona Venture Labs. Ravs Kaur (formerly of Microsoft and Tableau), product, engineering leader and data geek, and SaaS analytics go-to-market leader Joe Levy (formerly of Microsoft, Qpass, and Zettics) joined to take the company to market.

"At Avalara, we believe in empowering our developers with data so they can be the best engineers they can be. Uplevel directly enables this by giving everyone-from engineers through management-data about time usage, execution risk, and manager development so our engineering teams can operate with maximum effectiveness," said Danny Fields, EVP of Engineering and CTO of Avalara.

Engineering teams can now stop relying solely on gut instinct and obtrusive surveys. Uplevel analyzes ambient data in the tools engineers use every day and delivers:

Execution risk detection: Gain visibility into cross team dependencies, follow best practices, and leverage the Uplevel 'spread too thin' index to understand team bandwidth and resources.
Focus time protection: Reduce context switching, manage meetings and disruptions, and make deep work a team event so everyone can focus on high impact work.
Manager development and team engagement: Enables data-driven conversations, makes 1:1s more productive, and creates healthy team work habits.
"By focusing on a platform of transparency and trust, Uplevel stands alone in its ability to help all levels of an engineering team with a broad solution. Two of the hardest jobs in a company are VP of sales and VP of engineering because they both are constantly asked to predict the output of every quarter. While there are ample tools available for a VP of sales, the engineering organization has been underserved. This problem is substantial and no company to date has solved it," said Matt Howard, general partner, Norwest Venture Partners.

Uplevel is headquartered in Seattle, WA with a team of 16 full-time employees, and is currently hiring for product management, engineering and data science roles.

About Uplevel
Uplevel is your engineering effectiveness platform that leverages machine learning and organizational science to enable behavior change. Software engineers and managers get insights and alerts integrated into their daily workflow based on best practices and a superset of data from tools such as calendar, code repository, project management, and messaging. We believe that data-driven work cultures foster the most innovative teams. With Uplevel, engineers and managers are empowered with individual and team data so they can detect execution risks, protect time for what matters, and elevate their team – so everyone can focus on their best work. Uplevel is headquartered in Seattle, WA. Learn more at http://www.uplevelteam.com.