Jellyfish Secures $31.5M Series B To Grow Platform, Sales

Jellyfish, the Boston-based engineering management platform, closed a $31.5 million Series B to help push sales and product development after growing revenue by 5 times last year.

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The round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from previous investors Accel and Wing Venture Capital. The company raised a $12 million Series A last May, according to Crunchbase data.

The company’s platform aims to give visibility and insights to what an engineering team is doing and how it matches with business objectives, said co-founder and CEO Andrew Lau. That has become more important as every company has become a software company, he added.

“We saw the acceleration kick in last year, and there is an ability to put this money to work,” Lau said.

Visibility and efficiency

Jellyfish realized significant growth in 2020, as many companies were forced to find ways to get better visibility into departments with many employees working remotely, as well as needing to become more efficient in challenging economic times, Lau said.

Along with its revenue growth, the company also doubled its headcount to more than 40, he added.

Lau sees a large opportunity for further growth, comparing engineering departments to sales before Salesforce1 entered the market to bring data and structure to that department.

“This is like sales in the late 90s, before sales and marketing had real visibility,” he said.

Matt Gatto, managing director at Insight Partners, added that a platform such as Jellyfish’s helps bring more structure and data to setting business objectives for the engineering department.

Large opportunity ahead

“We’ve looked at this category for a while,” said Gatto, mentioning companies like BlueOptima, as well as GitPrime, which was acquired last May by Pluralsight for $170 million in cash.

However, he said the market has matured further through the last several years as every company looks to build software. While Jellyfish could be attractive to a large player in the DevOps space, Gatto said he sees “home-run potential” for the company and its platform down the line as the space grows.

“We think the winner of this market is a large standalone, public company,” he said.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.