Ten years ago, a moment of academic curiosity in a Dublin classroom set me on an unexpected path: to help shape how engineering will work in the AI era.
And today, that path reached a major milestone:
Milestone has raised $10M in seed funding, led by Heavybit and Hanaco Ventures, with participation from Atlassian Ventures and world-class leaders from AT&T, GitHub, Accenture, and Datadog.
It’s a moment worth celebrating, not just because of the capital, but because of what it enables:
a chance to turn a decade of research, collaboration, and hard-earned insight into a platform designed for the next era of engineering: the era of human + AI collaboration.
I was a visiting student sitting quietly in an “Agile 101” class at Trinity College Dublin.
By the end of that lecture, I walked up to Professor Stephen Barrett, and asked him a simple question:
“I’m fascinated by your research. Can I help?”
It wasn’t a strategy.
It wasn’t a career move.
It was curiosity. The kind that nudges your life in a new direction before you realize what’s happening.
That one conversation became a decade-long collaboration. Stephen and I kept returning to the same deceptively difficult question:
What does great engineering look like, and can we measure it?
This was long before AI copilots or generative models. But even then, we saw a shift happening in engineering:
The most important parts of engineering: the thinking, the coordination, the problem-solving – were becoming invisible.
If we could measure those invisible dynamics, we believed we could help engineering organizations unlock their full potential.
That belief eventually became Milestone.
Over the last two years, engineering has undergone one of the fastest transformations in its history.
AI tools now write, test, and optimize code alongside humans.
According to Stack Overflow, 84% of developers use AI daily.
Google reports that over 30% of its new code is AI-generated.
We’re now in an era where engineering is no longer human-only, it’s human + AI.
But at the same time, engineering leaders everywhere started asking the same questions:
Companies were adopting AI at record speed, but without visibility into its impact.
That gap between adoption and understanding became our mission.
Milestone connects across the entire development ecosystem: source control, CI/CD, planning systems, communication tools, HR systems, and the AI coding assistants themselves, and transforms those scattered signals into clear, actionable insights.
We help organizations understand:
It’s not guesswork.
It’s not anecdotes.
It’s real data about how engineering is evolving and how teams can evolve with it.
Engineering teams today mix and match tools: GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, Continue, Qodo, Atlassian’s suite, and more. Every company’s AI stack looks different.
That’s why Milestone integrates across all of them.
We act as the neutral intelligence layer that shows leaders the full picture across vendors, models, teams, and workflows.
Kyle Daigle, COO of GitHub, put it perfectly:
“Empowering developers with AI is critical, but understanding the impact is equally important.”
Across thousands of engineers in our partner network, we’re already seeing:
AI doesn’t replace developers, it amplifies them when the context and culture are right.
What began as an academic question between a professor and a curious student is now being used by forward-thinking engineering teams at companies like Monday.com, Kayak, and Sapiens.
They’re using Milestone to understand how AI-generated code correlates with quality, how workflows evolve over time, and how to build stronger, more aligned engineering cultures.
Seeing Milestone help real teams improve their performance and confidence in the AI era has been one of the most meaningful parts of this journey.
We’re still early in this transformation.
AI won’t just change how we write code.
It will redefine how teams learn, collaborate, measure success, and grow.
The organizations that thrive won’t be the ones who simply add AI to their stack, they’ll be the ones who deeply understand how AI shapes their engineering culture and outcomes.
That’s the future Milestone is built for.
With this new funding, we’re doubling down on that mission, expanding our team, enriching our platform, and helping engineering organizations everywhere navigate the shift from traditional development to human + AI engineering.
Ten years ago, Stephen and I set out to measure human engineering.
Today, we’re measuring human + AI engineering.
And tomorrow, we hope to help every team build a culture where that collaboration thrives.
This funding is a milestone, and still, in every way, Day One.
Onwards.
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