Today, Lightspeed is announcing that we’re leading a $30M Series A in Macroscope, an AI-powered understanding engine for teams. Founded by Kayvon Beykpour, Joe Bernstein, and Rob Bishop, Macroscope is leveraging AI to help teams of all sizes better understand and fix their codebase, enabling them to cancel meetings, file fewer JIRA tickets, and get back to building. Alongside their previous $10M seed round (led by Thrive, Adverb, and GV), this investment brings Macroscope’s total funding amount to $40M.
Real-time visibility into the codebase
Building tech companies is hard. Besides the obviously technical stuff — like writing code, designing beautiful software, and taking a product to market — the most challenging part about building a company may actually be keeping the team that’s building it on the same page as it scales.
As a former CEO and leader of a large team, I’ve experienced the pain firsthand. Once your team reaches several hundred team members, you spend most of your time doing busy work and untangling cross-team communication issues, rather than focusing on your strengths, your mission, or why you built a team in the first place.
While AI is certainly making it easier to write code or design a great UX, it still hasn’t gotten any easier to understand what’s happening to a product as the code is being written. And so, we continue to schedule meetings, file countless tickets, create new Slack channels, adding more layers of work just to understand and do the actual work.
Counterintuitively, AI is intensifying this problem. As building a company becomes even easier as more human-powered tasks are replaced with agentic work, we’ll have an even harder time understanding what’s actually happening to our codebases, organizations, and products.
Enter Macroscope.
Code walkers to the rescue
Macroscope uses AI to immediately understand everything that’s happening to a codebase as it’s evolving in realtime. It’s like the classic, “what did you get done last week?” email as a service, instantly giving both leaders and ICs instant visibility into what’s actually changing, evolving, breaking, and improving about a product.
While other developer platforms rely on simple semantic search to understand a codebase, Macroscope traverses the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of the code, building a comprehensive graph that captures relationships and dependencies across the entire codebase, and then leverages AI with this context to help humans understand it, regardless of technical ability. This makes it easier for anyone in an organization (SWEs, PMs, managers, designers, etc.) to get the ground truth without constantly bothering others in the organization. You know the meme of the manager standing over the shoulder of the IC engineer? Yeah, that just goes away. The result is fewer pointless meetings, and more progress.
But visibility is just the beginning. Macroscope leverages its deep understanding of a codebase and takes the next step: both reviewing and fixing bugs with automated AI code review, all powered by the code walkers. Their method of code review is hands down the best on the market 1, beating Code Rabbit, Cursor, Greptile, and Graphite at bug detection and comment volume.
The result of all of this — especially as the number of “contributors” to an organization explodes as a result of AI agents — is an AI “air traffic control system” for your company, making it easy to scale up productivity without drowning your team in the muck of busywork and status updates.
A team that has felt the pain first-hand
We believe there’s no better team on the planet to be building Macroscope. Co-founders Kayvon Beykpour, Joe Bernstein (who both cofounded Periscope), and Rob Bishop (cofounder of ML/Computer Vision startup Magic Pony) all led huge teams at Twitter, and witnessed firsthand the experience and dysfunction that comes with managing large engineering organizations when communication inevitably breaks down. They saw an opportunity for AI to not simply generate more output (as so many other startups are rightfully capitalizing on now), but organize, summarize, and fix the chaos — and help teams thrive.
With this Series A funding, we believe Macroscope is well-positioned to create an entirely new category of engineering intelligence tools that will become indispensable for software companies of all sizes. We’re thrilled to partner with the entire Macroscope team on this journey. If you’re interested in learning more about Macroscope or joining their team, visit their website.
And if you’re an IC or leader who wants to leverage AI to better understand what’s happening inside of your codebase, get started with Macroscope today: https://macroscope.com.
The content here should not be viewed as investment advice, nor does it constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. The views expressed here are those of the individual Lightspeed Management Company, L.L.C. (“Lightspeed”) personnel and are not the views of Lightspeed or its affiliates; other market participants could take different views.
Unless otherwise indicated, the inclusion of any third-party firm and/or company names, brands and/or logos does not imply any affiliation with these firms or companies.
[1] According to Macroscope’s internal benchmark of 100+ real-world bugs, Macroscope caught 5% more bugs from the dataset and generated 75% fewer comments compared to the second-best tool. See the team’s official blogpost for methodology: https://blog.macroscope.com/blog/code-review-benchmark.
Authors
