Pitango, TAU Ventures Invest In Israeli Codebase Tool Startup Swimm

Israeli startup Swimm raised $5.7 million in seed funding last week to help developers manage and synchronize codebases for faster, more efficient development processes and collaborations.

The round was led by Pitango First, alongside TAU Ventures, Axon Ventures and Fundfire. A group of angel investors also joined the round, including a co-founder of cybersecurity company Snyk.

Swimm was founded in 2019 by entrepreneurs Tom Ahi Dror, the former commander of the IDF’s Talpiot program (an elite training program for recruits with outstanding academic abilities) Gilad Navot, Oren Toledano, and Omer Rosenbaum. The four founders are formerly with Israel Tech Challenge, a high-tech academy that trains global graduates in cybersecurity and data science, then places them in software companies.

They set up Swimm to solve a pain point in the development process – understanding code that other people wrote – and bring teams up to speed on changing and evolving codebases. The tool Swimm helps developers quickly understand and navigate any codebase. Teams can also build tutorial units and documentation based on the current version of the company’s codebase.

“We immediately saw how much time, resources and effort companies had to invest into training developers — even experienced ones,” said Toledano, who serves as CEO of Swimm. “In most companies, developers were just thrown into the code pool at the deep end, and it became a question of sink or swim. It’s an expensive learning curve.”

Code remains one of the key challenges for any software organization, the company says, and undocumented knowledge can cause expensive delays and friction around onboarding, training, and remote work.

“Even the most agile teams can end up chasing down vital information, creating needless delays and slowing a project down,” added Toledano. “We didn’t create Swimm just to help companies improve their productivity; our focus was also on how we can make a developer’s journey into a codebase frictionless, faster and even a bit fun.”

“Software development is now at the core of every modern business. Swimm provides a structured, contextual and transparent way to improve developer productivity,” said Yair Cassuto, partner at Pitango First, who is joining Swimm’s Board. “Swimm’s solution allows for rapid and insightful onboarding on any codebase. This applies across the developer life cycle: from onboarding to project transitions, adopting new open source capabilities and even offboarding. We are fortunate to be part of the Swimm team’s journey to reimagine how knowledge is shared across code.”