GenAI has become an important part of coding workflows, but most companies struggle to track its use, let alone its ROI. Israeli startup Milestone hopes to help with a platform designed to correlate AI tool usage with technical metrics, including code quality.
The catch is that these companies have to give Milestone access to their codebases, a bet that investors initially questioned, CEO and co-founder Liad Elidan told TechCrunch. But with customers including Kayak, Monday and Sapiens, the startup has now raised a $10 million seed funding round led by San Francisco-based venture firm Heavybit and Israeli fund Hanaco Ventures.
In an unusual arrangement, Elidan and Milestone’s CTO had gone years without meeting in person when they started fundraising. Unlike most of Milestone’s Israel-based team members, Professor Stephen Barrett lives in Ireland and teaches computer science at Trinity College Dublin, where Elidan was once his student and the two bonded through software projects.
Despite the distance, the duo stayed in touch over the years and eventually decided to found a startup focused on engineering efficiency, just as coding assistants and other code generation tools took off. GitHub Copilot has since crossed the 20 million user mark, but companies still lack visibility into how these tools are being used and impacting productivity.
According to Elidan, Milestone answers these questions by relying on four pillars—codebases, project management platforms, team structure, and the codegen tools themselves—to create what he describes as “a genAI data lake.” In practice, this gives organizations actionable data about which teams are using AI and to what effect – thanks to their own information.
Armed with this data, managers are under constant pressure to leverage AI to push productivity, for example, being able to measure feature delivery speed, Elidan said, but also to find out whether recent bugs were caused by AI-generated code and to make informed decisions about where to deploy these tools.
This also gives Milestone a front-row seat on ROI – the “holy grail question” that it aims to answer in detail for its clients. But at a high level, he said, “We don’t have a customer who used Milestone and said, ‘Okay, GenAI isn’t helping me, I’m going to revoke all my licenses.’ It’s actually the opposite. They’re going to try more Gen AI tools.”
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This rapid adoption also means Milestone must keep up with a rapidly evolving landscape. “It used to be autocompletes, then it was chat, then it was agent-based chat, and it goes on,” Elidan said.
This is also where Barrett’s academic background helps the team understand the wave of transformation its clients are going through. “Many of the ways we used to think about engineering are going to have to change,” the professor told TechCrunch. “I think in some ways AI is filling out the team and engineers are now becoming managers.”
To keep up with the tools driving this wave, Milestone says it has partnered with many vendors, such as GitHub, Augment Code, Qodo, Continue and Atlassian — the company that powers Jira, and whose venture arm Atlassian Ventures also participated in this seed round.
The round was also backed by angel investors, including GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, former AT&T CEO John Donovan, Accenture senior tech advisor Paul Daugherty and Datadog’s former president Amit Agrawal — all of whom understand that what Milestone is building is relevant to the enterprise market, Elidan said.
This corporate focus was deliberate from day one, with Milestone even turning down potential customers who were too small — “a very hard thing to do,” Elidan said, but one that gave the startup clarity around a roadmap that requires enterprise credentials and features. Focus would be his most important advice to other founders, and Milestone takes it: the startup won’t expand to measure GenAI’s impact on marketing or other functions, even as it grows.