Working its magic, code refactoring platform Sourcery closes $1.75 million in seed funding

London-based Sourcery, an AI code assistant that helps developers write better code faster, has raised $1.75 million in seed funding. The new dust will help the alchemists expand the engineering team, continue development of the platform, and cast new spells in the enterprise team's direction. Prior to this raise, the magicians from Islington had pulled $120,000 out of the hat via the TechStars Berlin Accelerator.

Founded in 2018, Sourcery’s goal is clear: to put a sizeable dent in the 4.9 billion hours a year that developers waste dealing with, shall we say, sub-standard code. With today’s modus operandi relying on manual code review or tools that flag potential issues with the code, there’s still a human input needed in getting things ship-shape.

By remaining a few steps ahead of the developer, Sourcery reads and understands the code being worked upon and suggests cleaner, improved versions to replace it.

Think Grammarly, but for clearer, cleaner, and human error-prone code.

Employing a bit of 21st-century magic, i.e. an AI-based approach, Sourcery automatically reviews and refactors this junky code in real-time, showing developers exactly how less-than-great code can be improved. Not only does this method cut down on technical debt and a reduction in time spent on manual code review, but it also serves to increase the speed of future development.

And there’s no need for developers to give up the ghost in the preferred development platform, as Sourcery’s magic bag of tools currently integrates directly into Visual Studio Code, PyCharm, Sublime, Vim, Emacs, and GitHub, and/or into a company’s CI/CD pipeline.

This magic hasn’t gone unnoticed, as Sourcery reports over 7,000 developers making their way through the shop on a monthly basis, with household names including Sky, Microsoft, Amazon, and LinkedIn all benefiting from what the company has on offer.

Sourcery’s $1.75 million seed funding round was led by Forward Partners alongside Runa Capital, Techstars, Angel Invest, CapitalX, Acequia Capital, and other undisclosed private angel investors.

“The software-eaten world continues to empower software engineers, but at the same time, increases its own dependency on their mistakes. Sourcery brilliantly leverages this trend by automating code refactoring, which both boosts developers’ productivity and makes their code less error-prone,” commented Runa Capital’s Konstantin Vinogradov. “Its team does the right thing at the right time, and we are pleased to support them in this journey.”