Every developer has their own unique style of writing code. Despite companies establishing best practices and drawing up documentation, it can be hard for developers to understand someone else’s codebase.
To solve this problem, Dennis Pilarinos built a tool called Unblocked — an AI-powered assistant that answers contextual questions about lines of code.
Pilarinos is a seasoned professional at building developer tools. He has worked as a director at Microsoft and Amazon, working on Azure and Amazon Web Services. Later, Pilarinos built a continuous integration platform for remote teams called Buddybuild, which was acquired by Apple in 2018, and he also worked at Apple for around two years on the Xcode Cloud platform.
“Developers trying to get the information they want is quite painful and time-consuming,” Pilarinos told TechCrunch in a phone interview. “We wanted to use all the data, code, and tribal knowledge of conversations to present developers with easy answers.”
Pilarinos added that with more AI programming tools seeping into developers’ workflows, the aforementioned problems are going to get worse.
Unblocked integrates with development environments and apps like Slack, Jira, Confluence, Google Drive, and Notion. The tool gathers intelligence about a company’s codebase and helps answer questions such as “Where do we define user metrics in our system?” Developers can also use the platform to search for the person who made changes to a particular module and quickly gain insights from them.
Unblocked offers admin controls that can be easily adopted by a company’s system admin, and the startup is working on integrating with platforms like Cursor and Lovable to improve code explainability.
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Beyond this, Unblocked is developing tools that actively help developers with projects rather than simply answer questions. One, Autonomous CI triage, supports developers in testing code through different scenarios.
Unblocked counts companies such as Drata, AppDirect, Big Cartel, and TravelPerk as customers. Pilarinos claims that engineers at Drata were able to save 1-2 hours per week using Unblocked’s platform.
Unblocked said Tuesday it has raised $20 million in Series A funding from B Capital and Radical Ventures. The round takes the company’s total capital raised to $30 million from investors including Amplify Partners, First Round Capital, and XYZ Capital.
Rob Toews, a partner at Radical Ventures, said that as AI-generated code proliferates, products like Unlocked will become extremely valuable.
“There is a thesis that much of the software in the future will be written by AI,” Toews said. “There will be second- and third-order effects of that, creating new challenges. One of them is that people won’t understand when, why, and how [a particular piece of code] was written.”
Toews thinks that, just as AI-powered Glean enabled enterprises to make sense of their troves of data, Unblocked will help devs understand their increasingly complicated codebases.
