As businesses move online during the pandemic, Mattan Talmi, founder and CEO of Spinach.io, has noticed that engineering teams have different needs for online meetings than other teams. At the same time, Magnify Apps announced that it is releasing Magnify on the Magnify platform to help developers build meeting-focused applications.
He and his co-founders decided to build a meeting tool designed for engineers who use an agile method to conduct online meetings. They wanted to integrate tools from Slack, Jira and other engineers to track their projects and bring it to a level of automation, and they started building the product last year. Today, the startup announced its $6 million seed round of funding since launch in 2021.
What we’re trying to do here is solve a very specific use case for engineering teams following the Scrum Agile development process. They have specific meetings and workflows around those development sprints and require specific experiences to deliver deep value. ” Talmi told TechCrunch.
While anyone can benefit from setting up meetings with separate agendas and shared meeting notes, Spinach said he’s focusing on the stand-up meetings that engineering teams start each day. “We started with a special kind of meeting, which is the daily get-up, and the daily check-in, which is the core of good growth momentum. This is where the teams meet every morning, and we built this kind of meeting as an experience that’s particularly convenient and helps them do it on autopilot,” he said.
Because it integrates with project management software like Jira, it can pull in goals from the previous day, current goals, and any obstacles the team may have that are preventing them from achieving their goals. Integrated with Slack to move information back and forth across the engineering communication channel.
Image Credits: Spinach.io
It’s integrated like ours in Zoom, but it can go with other online meeting tools like Microsoft Teams and Google Meet with the web tool. It has plans to integrate with other project management tools like ClickUp, Asana, and Monday.com, and other services engineering teams tend to use over time, like Figma, Notion, and GitHub.
The company is announcing the tool publicly for the first time today, but it has been in private beta for some time and 100 groups are working with the tool, including groups on Wix, Fiverr and Rappi.
The engineering standup meeting is the first use case, but he says he plans to expand the product to include other engineering meetings over time. The company recently finished on Y Combinator as part of the Winter 2022 cohort.
Talmy says his experience at YC shows he has something to say about this idea. When we had our first conversation with the founders of Y Combinator, they were very excited about what we were doing because they were curious about what the next generation of companies would look like, and everyone was on board. Establishing a remote-first company.
The company currently has a team of 9 people and they are hiring. Talmi sees being a remote company as a way to build a more diverse team. “Just by being a remote company ourselves, we can hire people in different locations. And so you get that differentiation a lot easier than you would in a single market.
While Talmi sees mixed economic conditions like anyone else, he thinks the company’s products are a good fit for any environment, especially when many companies are moving away. “A lot of companies are struggling to get people back into the office, and there’s this tension that a lot of people have been talking about in recent months… and even with the market downturn, it’s becoming clear that it’s going to take a long time.” How people work and how companies work with remote work will actually become a kind of standard default.
Today’s $6 million seed round was led by strategic investor Atlassian with support from Y Combinator, Zoom Ventures, Maven Ventures, Tuesday Capital and Cardumen Capital.
