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June 22, 2021

Moderne Closes Initial $4.7 Million Seed Round for Code Automation Tool

SEATTLE, June 22, 2021 — Moderne, a code automation company, today announced that it has raised $4.7 million in initial funding to bring to market the company’s SaaS solution that accelerates software development by automating code migration and fixes across a company’s entire application stack and codebase. The round was led by True Ventures and included participation from Mango Capital, Overtime.vc, GitHub CTO Jason Warner, Datadog co-founder and CEO Olivier Pomel, and Coverity co-founder and former CTO Andy Chou.

Software development has undergone significant changes in the last ten years, driven by the adoption of agile, cloud-native development, DevOps, and the growth of the API economy. It is no longer built completely in-house, and instead, it is integrated from open source and third-party components. Maintaining the software requires keeping up with the constant changes to all of these components, and tracking ongoing common vulnerabilities and exposure (CVE) fixes and managing thousands of APIs. It is an enormous challenge for any size company, taking up to 30% of the development team’s time, which acts as a tremendous drag on innovation and software quality. The growth in code volume, variety, and velocity have exacerbated the problem.

Moderne was founded to tackle this enormous problem by Jonathan Schneider and Olga Kundzich, who previously worked together at Pivotal with a large number of enterprise customers on an unrelated technology. This experience demonstrated to them that there was a huge unaddressed pain point around modernizing and securing code, with remarkable similarities in the problems faced by companies of various sizes and industries. Moderne’s technology is based on OpenRewrite, a large-scale automated refactoring tool for code (initially Java) that Jonathan developed while at Netflix.

The technology originated at Netflix because of its culture of freedom and responsibility. Gating different parts of the software delivery lifecycle to coerce engineers to change code was anti-cultural, so Netflix engineers with a focus on developer productivity had to think of ways to offer help instead. Code automation was the only scalable solution, which is how OpenRewrite was born.

Moderne has picked up OpenRewrite and expanded its scope to allow for full framework migrations like Spring Boot 1 to 2 and JUnit 4 to 5, security vulnerabilities fixes, and created many more high-level building blocks that make authoring custom transformations easier than ever. Moderne has also begun expanding into other languages other than Java starting with infrastructure-as-code with Kubernetes, YAML, and XML refactoring.

The Moderne SaaS solution applies OpenRewrite recipes across a large-scale codebase to search and transform millions of lines of code in minutes. This organization-wide transformation capability includes code visibility from source to production to prioritize remediation on source code that is demonstrably used in critical production systems.

“While cloud-native development has accelerated the digital transformation of organizations across every industry, it has introduced enormous complexities in maintaining the quality and security of the software,” said Puneet Agarwal, partner at True Ventures. “By making code automation more than just a promise, Moderne has a real opportunity to dramatically improve the software development process and to focus developers on what matters most – creating great applications that power business.”

Moderne will use the funding to expand the company’s engineering team and drive further capabilities in its SaaS solution, which is currently in private beta with early adopters and design partners. Moderne has already had great success recruiting top engineering talent, due to the high level of interest, energy, and passion in the developer community to solve the critical problem of maintaining software code through code automation. The funding will also be used to build a vibrant and growing open source community for OpenRewrite, and to contribute refactoring recipes and manage the core open-source framework.

“Engineers want to do the right thing, but they need help because there is already too much on their plate. Moderne was created to be a partner in helping teams actually do the work to improve their code security, quality, and modernity,” said Jonathan Schneider, co-founder, and CEO.”

About Moderne

Moderne’s mission is to solve the laborious and manual tasks of software development that suck the life and productivity out of developers. The company accelerates software development through semantic code search and transformation across an organization’s application stack to empower developers to do what they love—create great software. Moderne is based in Seattle and its investors include True Ventures, Mango Capital, Overtime.vc, GitHub CTO Jason Warner, Datadog co-founder and CEO Olivier Pomel and Coverity co-founder and former CTO Andy Chou. To learn more visit https://moderne.io.


Source: Moderne

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