Milestone Raises $10M to Ensure AI Delivers Business Value

Coding workflows now heavily rely on generative AI, yet most businesses find it difficult to monitor its application, let alone its ROI. Milestone, an Israeli firm, intends to assist with a platform that links the use of AI tools with engineering KPIs, such as code quality.

CEO and Co-founder Liad Elidan said that these businesses must grant Milestone access to their codebases, a wager that investors first questioned. However, the startup has recently raised a $10 million seed fundraising round led by Israeli fund Hanaco Ventures and San Francisco-based venture firm Heavybit, with clients like Kayak, Monday, and Sapiens.

By the time they began fundraising, Elidan and Professor Stephen Barrett, Milestone’s CTO, had not met in person for years, which was an odd situation. Barrett lives in Ireland and teaches computer science at Trinity College Dublin, where Elidan was formerly a student. The two became close through software projects, in contrast to the majority of Milestone’s Israel-based team members.

Despite their distance, the two remained in contact throughout time and ultimately chose to launch an engineering efficiency-focused firm at the same time as coding assistants and other code-generation tools were becoming popular.

Although GitHub Copilot has subsequently surpassed 20 million users, businesses are still unable to see how these tools are being utilized and how they are affecting productivity.

Elidan claims that to construct what he refers to as “a GenAI data lake,” Milestone relies on four pillars: codebases, project management platforms, team organization, and the codegen tools themselves. This provides companies with useful information on which teams employ AI and how, based on their own data.

Equipped with this information, managers who are constantly under pressure to utilize AI to increase productivity may, for example, analyze the pace at which features are delivered, determine whether recent defects were caused by AI-generated code, and make well-informed judgments about where to deploy these technologies, according to Elidan.