As developers and engineers will tell you, knowledge sharing and code documentation have made so many of Israel's high-tech solutions possible. The challenge for companies has always been to make these necessary endeavors also cost-effective and efficient.
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This is the challenge that brought the founders of Israel-based startup Swimm together. The four engineers who founded the company worked together at the Israel Tech Challenge (ITC) coding bootcamp.
Oren Toledano, Omer Rosenbaum, Tom Ahi Dror, and Gilad Navot observed engineering teams waging a constant struggle to create and maintain documentation of their codebases, and realized that as a result of documentation problems, most companies were devoting huge amounts of resources toward tasks like debugging and problem solving instead of new coding.
Ideally, developers will document every change they make. But because they know the codebase changes daily, and they would rather use their valuable and often limited time on other problem-solving, current documentation can quickly become outdated. Creating high-quality documentation simply takes too much time and effort for many companies.
Toledano, Swimm's CEO, explains that "Swimm was created to help engineering teams better understand their code and create strong knowledge building through a new protocol we call Continuous Documentation."
"This means that every time the codebase changes, the documentation should reflect the changes automatically. This should help teams improve communication, knowledge sharing, and discoverability as they can rely on the documentation as their bible," he says.
Despite the many years of individual experience enjoyed by the founders, Swimm itself is relatively new, founded in 2019. But the company is getting noticed. In January 2020, it secured $5.7 million in seed funding, led by Pitango, with participation from TAU Ventures, Axon Ventures, Fundfire, and a group of angel investors. A year later, Swimm Beta was officially announced, offered for free to Open Source maintainers and core contributors.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, Swimm was in the middle of an expansion, opening a new office in New York and bringing on new developers in Tel Aviv. The Alpha version of their auto-synced code documentation software proved valuable for remote onboarding and training, allowing the company to flourish in the difficult pandemic circumstances.
Swimm has big plans for 2021. "We learned a lot this year about the way developers and their teams onboard, sync and work," says Toledano.
"We got a lot of feedback from customers, who stressed the need to streamline knowledge sharing and reduce dependency delays due to remote work. The goal now is to provide a tool that's much more than just something to help developers with new coding. We want to make the entire development cycle more efficient, by actively speeding up the inner development loop, which will ultimately help every company's bottom line."
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