Gigster, an on-demand software development and design provider, today announced a $10 million Series A funding round.
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Y Combinator Continuity Fund I, Ron Conway of SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher of Sound Ventures and Jason Calacanis of Launch Fund.
Gigster provides on-demand software development and design for enterprises and startups of all sizes. With Gigster, customers can click a button, chat with a product manager, get a fixed-price quote and hire a top-tier development team within minutes. Gigster offers access to engineering talent that is otherwise very difficult to reach and can consume a large portion of an organization’s resources.
Built with the developer in mind, Gigster boasts top engineering talent trained at universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and with work experience at tech titans like Google, Facebook and Pinterest. The company’s founders, Roger Dickey and Debo Olaosebikan, both long-time developers, had experienced firsthand the pain of working with development shops and agencies and wanted to build the best experience for the developer—hoping this would, in turn, create the best experience and product for the customer.
“Software development that requires continuous recruiting and months of development time writing code from scratch is slow and costly, and not necessarily a consistent internal need of all startups or large enterprises,” said Dickey, CEO of Gigster, in a statement. “Hiring talented engineers is hard—so don’t. Instead, let Gigster be your engineering department.”
This Series A financing comes at a critical period of growth at Gigster, where investing in its core technology and market position is key to delivering on its vision to become the world’s engineering department. Gigster is working on building a higher level language for software. Every project it works on feeds back into a central brain that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to optimize efficiency, resulting in both shorter project turnaround times and lower costs for customers.
Gigster also announced that Andreessen Horowitz partner and former SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard will join the Gigster board of directors.
“Gigster is filling an important, unmet need in today’s digital world,” Dalgaard said in a statement. “We see so many startups and companies wasting resources on hiring developers and unnecessarily scaling just to build prototypes, when they should be able to build them with the click of a button. Now with Gigster, they can do that.”
Last week, Codeship, a Web-based continuous delivery service for testing and deploying code, announced it received a funding round of $1.5 million from new and existing investors to build up the company.
This latest investment, mostly from existing investors like Sigma Prime Ventures, Boston Seed Capital and F-Prime Capital, brought the total funding raised to date to $4.4 million. Codeship was created to automate and simplify the DevOps process of release engineering, and this latest round will further accelerate the company’s growth and momentum.
Moritz Plassnig, CEO of Codeship, told eWEEK he considers release management to be one of the hardest parts of engineering after the original launch of a product.