Macroscope: AI-Powered Code Understanding Engine Raises $40M to Revolutionize Software Development

Meet Macroscope: an AI tool for understanding your code base, fixing bugs | TechCrunch

The founders who previously sold their livestreaming video startup Periscope to Twitter are back with a new startup -- and no surprise, it's an AI-focused company this time around. On Wednesday, former Twitter head of product Kayvon Beykpour announced the launch of Macroscope, an AI system aimed at developers and product leaders that summarizes updates to a codebase and catches bugs, among other things. The startup was co-founded by Beykpour, now Macroscope CEO, in July 2023, along with childhood friend Joe Bernstein, also previously of Periscope and their prior enterprise startup, Terriblyclever, which was sold to Blackboard in 2009. They're joined by co-founder Rob Bishop, who sold his computer vision and machine learning company, Magic Pony Technology, to Twitter in 2016. The company describes its product as an "AI-powered understanding engine" that's designed to save engineers time, and the type of product the founders "wish we'd had" when building their earlier companies. Today, engineers use a variety of tools to keep track of work, like JIRA, Linear, and spreadsheets, and spend too much time in meetings instead of building, Beykpour says. Macroscope is designed to fix this. "I feel like I lived this pain...at every company I worked at, whether it was the startups that we built ourselves, or whether it was enormous public companies like Twitter, we sort of lived this problem the hard way," Beykpour told TechCrunch in an interview. "Trying to get a sense for what everyone was doing, especially when you have an organization like Twitter with thousands of engineers, it was literally most of my job -- and my least favorite part of my job as the head of product at Twitter," he said. To address this issue and others, Macroscope's customers first install its GitHub app, which gives the company access to the code base. They can then optionally install other integrations, like a Slack app, Linear app, and JIRA app. The software then does the rest of the work by analyzing the code and noting what's changing. This involves a process called code walking, which uses the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) -- a structural representation of programming code -- to gather important context about how the customer's code base works. That knowledge is then used in conjunction with large language models (LLMs). Once up and running, engineers can use Macroscope to discover bugs to fix in their PRs (pull requests), summarize their PRs, get a summary of how the codebase is changing, and ask code research-based questions. Meanwhile, product leaders could use the software to get real-time summaries of product updates, productivity insights, answers to natural language questions about the product, code, or development activity, and more. This can help them determine what teams are prioritizing in terms of engineering allocation. "You can ask natural language questions, regardless of what your technical ability is," notes Beykpour. "This might be very useful if you're trying to learn about the code base without distracting a senior engineer on your team. Very valuable. If you're a CEO and you want to understand literally, 'what did we get done this week?', your options are either ask Macroscope or go distract some teammates," he adds. "One is a lot more expensive than the other." While there isn't a product that offers a direct competitor to all that Macroscope offers, it does compete in the code review space -- where developers examine and test code changes before they're implemented -- with tools like CodeRabbit, Cursor Bugbot, Graphite Diamond, Greptile, and others. However, the company said when it ran its own internal benchmark of over 100 real-world bugs, its product caught 5% more bugs than the next-best tool. It also generated 75% fewer comments. (It shared its benchmark publicly in a blog post.) The software costs $30 per active developer per month, starting at five seats, and offers enterprise pricing and custom integrations for larger businesses. It requires the use of GitHub Cloud. Ahead of its launch, a number of startups and larger firms have been using the product, including XMTP, Things, United Masters, Bilt, Class.com, Seed.com, ParkHub, A24 Labs, and others. The San Francisco-based startup has a team of 20 and is backed by $30 million in Series A funding, which was closed in July and led by Michael Mignano at Lightspeed. Other investors include Adverb, Thrive Capital, and Google Ventures. To date, Macroscope has raised $40 million total.

Ten years after selling Periscope to Twitter, startup's co-founder raises $40 million for Macroscope

It's been a decade since Kayvon Beykpour sold Periscope to Twitter for a reported $100 million, allowing the social media site to jump into livestreaming. Twitter shuttered Periscope in 2021, and the parent company, now called X and owned by Elon Musk, gravitated to a live events product called Spaces. Meanwhile, Beykpour, who spent seven years at Twitter after the acquisition, is back with Macroscope. He said on Wednesday that he's raised $40 million from venture investors, including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Lightspeed Venture Partners and Thrive Capital. While Periscope targeted a consumer audience, Macroscope is going squarely after businesses. Beykpour's idea is to help software developers easily spot issues in their code, and show managers what their engineers are doing. Beykpour said the lack of transparency in the software development process was a big problem in his former gig. "So much of my job as the head of product at Twitter was just understanding what the hell was happening," Beykpour, said in an interview. "You have all these engineers at the company and all these very important things that we need to get done with absolute opaqueness around, like, What progress did we make? What are all these people working on?" He said the startup set out to help product leaders first and added features for programmers later. Macroscope integrates with Microsoft-owned GitHub's source code repositories and project management software from Atlassian and Linear. Its technology connects to artificial intelligence models from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI that can propose alternative code and answer questions from developers and product executives. Products like GitHub Copilot and Cursor's BugBot already can review code with help from AI. Beykpour said that in testing Macroscope outperformed competitors when it came to correctly identifying known software bugs. And when it comes to tools to help managers stay on top of developers' activity, there's not much available, Beykpour said. "They're solving it with meetings," he said. "If we cannot surpass the bar of, people call a meeting to ask a bunch of engineers what's happening, we've failed miserably." Macroscope costs $30 per developer per month, which includes the status-checking components for bosses, while Cursor is priced at $32 per month when purchased annually. Early users include film studio A24, online learning startup Class and probiotics company Seed Health. Beykpour started Macroscope in 2023 with Periscope co-founder Joseph Bernstein and Rob Bishop, founder of AI startup Magic Pony, which Twitter acquired in 2016. The company has 17 employees and is based in San Francisco.

Macroscope raises $30M to speed up software projects with AI - SiliconANGLE

Macroscope Inc., a startup working to make developers and project managers more productive, today announced that it has closed a $30 million Series A funding round. Lightspeed led the investment. Macroscope previously raised a $10 million seed round that included the participation of Alphabet Inc.'s GV startup fund, Thrive Capital and Adverb. Macroscope was founded in 2023 by Kayvon Beykpour and Joseph Bernstein, who had previously created the Periscope live streaming platform. Twitter Inc. acquired Periscope in 2015 through a transaction reportedly valued at $100 million. Macroscope's third founder, Rob Bishop, earlier established an artificial intelligence startup called Magic that was likewise acquired by Twitter. Macroscope provides an AI platform that focuses on two main use cases. The first is helping developers find and fix bugs in their code faster. According to the company, its platform's other focus is making it easier for project managers to understand how software development initiatives are coming along. Developers can set up Macroscope in a few seconds by connecting it to their GitHub repositories. From there, the company maps out the code in the repositories by analyzing their abstract syntax trees, or ASTs. An AST is a file that provides a high-level description of what computing operations an application performs, when and on what data. Developers add new code to software projects through a mechanism known as a pull request. Such requests invite a colleague to review the code for issues before it's rolled out to production. According to Macroscope, the platform automatically scans pull requests for bugs and generates a natural language explanation of the issues it finds. It can also suggest a fix. For the reviewers tasked with validating a pull request, Macroscope highlights the specific section of a code submission where they should start reading. Understanding an application component sometimes requires reviewers to study adjacent code snippets first. Ahead of today's funding announcement, Macroscope compared its platform with several competing AI bug detection tools. The company used a custom benchmark with more than 100 bug detection tasks. Macroscope says that its platform won the top spot by completing 48% of the tasks correctly. Alongside its bug detection features, the company provides project tracking tools for managers and non-technical workers. A dashboard visualizes how much time developers spent on each major code update to an application. It also displays AI-generated update summaries, the top contributors to a project and other data. Users can enrich the information the platform collects from code repositories by connecting it to project management tools such as Jira. In many cases, such tools contain details about not only past software updates but also future enhancements. A Slack integration enables Macroscope to answer user questions in the collaboration service's interface.