Why we invested in Propelo

By Tim Young

We’re excited to share that Propelo just announced its $12 million Series A.

We first invested in the company’s seed round in 2019, back it was known as LevelOps. But we haven’t said much about the investment publicly until today, when — along with revealing the series A — founder/CEO Nishant Doshi and his team also publicly launched the Propelo platform.

Like so many of our seed deals, we backed the company when it was pre-product and pre-launch. The reason was simple: Nishant. He’s a repeat entrepreneur, and when his previous startup CirroSecure was acquired by Palo Alto Networks, he became the larger company’s vice president of engineering.

As Nishant explains in a new blog post, it was through managing a team of more than 100 engineers that he saw the need for something like Propelo — something that would allow him to answer important questions (“Are the new developers and teams productive?“) and objectively measure the team’s performance.

To do this, Propelo has built an AI-driven intelligence module coupled with a no-code RPA module, allowing customers to act on this intelligence with automated playbooks called “Propels.” The platform connects with more than 40 DevOps tools, and it’s already being used by customers ranging from high-growth SaaS startups to Fortune 500 companies.

With the new funding led by Decibel Partners, we believe Propelo has the potential to redefine how we measure engineering success — allowing teams to quantify the good work that they’re already doing, while also identifying areas that need to be improved.