Intel & JVP lead investment in Centrical's employee

Centrical, an Israeli startup developing an employee success platform, closed a $32 million funding round, led by main stakeholder JVP and new investor Intel Capital. The round also saw participation from  C4 Ventures and Citi Ventures, also new investors, as well as existing investors Aleph, CE Ventures, La Maison Compagnie d’Investissement and 2B Angels.

"Dominate the Employee-Centric Success category"

Formerly known as GamEffective, Centrical provides employees with an AI-powered, personalized, and gamified experience that unifies real-time performance management, continuous feedback, microlearning, and employee engagement while supporting managers with interactive coaching and managerial tools. The company reported usage had increased 6X during the pandemic year that was 2020, following in a long line of digital solutions seeing business accelerate over the last year.

"Over the prior eleven months, customer usage of the Centrical platform grew by more than 500%. That's a clear indication Centrical is key to forming performance-driven cultures in businesses," said Gal Rimon, Centrical's Founder & CEO. "Centrical will dominate the Employee-Centric Success category because of our ability to understand the role employees play in an enterprise, and offer the right way to engage them to create a win-win engagement. This investment lets us bring an even more compelling set of solutions to more organizations to make employees the center of their business success."

Centrical was founded in 2013 by CEO Gal Rimon, and plans to use the funds to accelerate market engagement, enter new markets, and enhance customer value by the creation of additional solutions attuned to the needs of organizations and their employees who operate in an increasingly hybrid work environment. Verizon and Microsoft are just a couple of the market leading customers that have successfully used the Centrical platform.

Erel Margalit, JVP's Founder & Executive Chairman who becomes Centrical's Board Chairman said: "With the Centrical platform, employees are enabled to thrive by working together while simultaneously creating a language by which their managers are able to empower and support them, aligning their personal goals within the framework of the larger objectives and milestones of the organization. With so many employees working from home these days, this sense of connection is needed now more than ever, as you simply cannot win a game alone: passing, blocking and screening are all necessary actions for the team if they're going to score and win the game. And that is the Centrical breakthrough, making this company a category leader."

LinearB snags $16M

Israeli-American startup LinearB, which develops a new, smart approach to project management and metrics, closed a $16 million Series A funding round. The investment was led by Battery Ventures, with participation from existing investors 83North and Angel investor, Ariel Maislos, and new investor TechAviv Founder Partners.

Happier developers

Launched in 2019, LinearB’s Software Delivery Intelligence helps dev teams continuously accelerate delivery by correlating development pipeline data from code, Git, projects and releases to provide visibility, context and workflow automation for every member of the team. More than 1,500 software development teams in total use LinearB, including many hyper-growth startups and unicorns like Axonius, BigID, Unbabel, Appcues and Clubhouse.

The company reports that unlike traditional management tools, the Software Delivery Intelligence platform offers value down the development supply chain. This provides CTOs and VPs of Engineering with complete visibility, based on team metrics, to better understand efficiency and quality, detect process bottlenecks, visualize team health, and ensure alignment between engineering work and business priorities. By deploying automation tools, LinearB becomes a favorite among developers, eliminating manual tasks, while empowering them with actionable insight to improve efficiency.

The result is happier developers with more time to build, continuous team improvement and tighter alignment to business priorities which leads to accelerated delivery. Dev teams using LinearB SDI improve their time-to-value (Cycle Time) by 48 percent on average after 90 days.

"Metrics alone do not improve dev teams. This is the mistake first-generation engineering efficiency tools made. Software Delivery Intelligence takes visibility and turns it into insight and active improvement," said Ori Keren, CEO of LinearB. "Helping engineering teams improve and scale is not about managing developers more strictly with top down control. It's about empowering developers by giving them more context, less bureaucracy and more time to build."

A driving factor in LinearB's rapid growth is its focus on community and facilitating new thinking. Its fast-growing Dev Interrupted online community and podcast for progressive dev leaders facilitates open discussions and shared experiences around scaling teams, building culture and using Software Delivery Intelligence. LinearB co-founder Dan Lines leads these efforts.

LinearB was founded in 2018 by CEO Ori Keren and COO Dan Lines, both worked on the executive team at CloudLock, which was acquired by Cisco in 2016. With the Series A concluded, this brings LinearB’s total funding to $21 million to date.