The funding, led by Heavybit and Hanaco Ventures, underscores a growing demand for clarity amidst the AI hype. But Milestone’s approach isn’t without its challenges: gaining access to proprietary codebases requires a leap of faith from potential clients.
The story behind Milestone’s founding is as intriguing as its mission. CEO Liad Elidan and CTO Professor Stephen Barrett forged their partnership across geographical boundaries. Barrett, a computer science professor at Trinity College Dublin, taught Elidan years ago. Their shared passion for software projects kept them connected, eventually leading to the birth of a startup focused on engineering efficiency.
While most of the Milestone team is based in Israel, Barrett’s presence in Ireland highlights the increasingly global nature of tech innovation. The duo’s long-distance collaboration exemplifies the modern reality of building a company in a connected world.
Milestone’s core offering revolves around creating what Elidan describes as “a genAI data lake.” This involves integrating data from codebases, project management platforms, team structures, and the AI tools themselves. The goal is to provide organizations with actionable insights into how AI is being used and its impact on productivity.
GitHub Copilot, for instance, has crossed the bar of 20 million users , but many companies struggle to quantify its true value. Milestone steps in to fill this visibility gap, offering metrics that go beyond mere usage statistics.
The insights gleaned from Milestone’s platform can be transformative for engineering managers. They can measure feature delivery speed, identify whether AI-generated code contributed to recent bugs, and make informed decisions about where to implement these tools most effectively.
This data-driven approach allows companies to move beyond anecdotal evidence and make strategic investments in AI tools. It’s about optimizing workflows, not just adopting the latest technology for its own sake.
“We don’t have a customer that used Milestone and said, ‘Okay, GenAI doesn’t help me, I’m going to revoke all my licenses.’ It’s actually the opposite. They want to try more Gen AI tools.” – Liad Elidan, CEO of Milestone.
The rapid pace of innovation in the AI space presents a constant challenge for Milestone. As Elidan notes, “It used to be auto-completes, then it was chat, then it was agentic-based chat, and it keeps going.”
Barrett’s academic background helps the team stay ahead of the curve, understanding the fundamental shifts occurring in software engineering. “A lot of the ways we used to think about engineering are going to have to change,” he observes. “I think in some sense, AI is filling out the team, and engineers are now becoming managers.”
To maintain its edge, Milestone has forged partnerships with key players in the development ecosystem, including GitHub, Augment Code, Qodo, Continue, and Atlassian. Atlassian Ventures, the venture arm of the company behind Jira, also participated in the seed round.
The funding round also saw support from industry veterans like GitHub cofounder Tom Preston-Werner, former AT&T CEO John Donovan, Accenture’s senior tech advisor Paul Daugherty, and Datadog’s ex-president Amit Agrawal.
Milestone’s commitment to enterprise clients reflects a deliberate strategic choice. The company has even turned down smaller clients to maintain its focus on delivering enterprise-grade features. This focus will remain even as the company grows, resisting the urge to expand into measuring GenAI’s impact on other functions like marketing.
As AI continues to reshape the software development landscape, Milestone’s ability to provide concrete ROI metrics could prove invaluable. The company’s success hinges on its ability to navigate the complexities of code integration and deliver actionable insights that drive real business value. The future of software engineering may well depend on our ability to measure, understand, and optimize the impact of AI, and Milestone is positioning itself to lead the charge.
