When Chad Pytel introduced me to Bryan Helmkamp, CEO/Co-founder of Code Climate, I knew that I had to pay attention.  Chad is the CEO of thoughtbot, a consulting firm that makes web + mobile apps for early-stage startups.  The two companies had been working together for a while, especially as both are deeply embedded within the Ruby on Rails developer community, with a strong following for their respective offerings.  As an Advisor to thoughtbot the past couple years, I’ve come to place a lot of weight and trust in Chad’s opinion.

So I chatted with Bryan about Code Climate’s service, which provides automated code review (originally Ruby, but also JavaScript and now PHP).  It essentially gives developers another set of eyes on every commit. Their platform leverages data and algorithms to help developers make their code faster, secure, maintainable, and bug-free.

The stats behind what Bryan and the team had accomplished while bootstrapping the business were incredible, including signing up over 1,000 paying accounts and analyzing over 30,000 code repositories EVERY DAY. In the three years since launching the business, they’ve become the clear market leader in SaaS static analysis.

But what impressed me most is what happened next.

I shared a link to Code Climate with a number of CTOs/VPs of Engineering in my network, both inside and outside the NextView portfolio, just asking for their quick opinion.  I expected to hear a balanced set of positive and negative feedback, after which it’s my job to sort through it as part of our diligence process.  Instead, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Their teams were either already customers or they had immediately become customers after learning about it.  Just a sampling of quotes from these responses:

• “I think it’s a great service for developers. I consider it a must-have default for most projects.”
• “I’m quite bullish.”
• “I can definitely see it being pretty big.”
• “I really like CC, and we’ve integrated it nicely into our workflow.”
• “It’s indispensable.”

Today Code Climate is announcing that they’ve raised a $2M round of financing, led by us at NextView Ventures.  Joining us in the syndicate are Lerer Ventures, Trinity Ventures, and Fuel Capital.

Code Climate talks about a world where static analysis is as critical to every developer as GitHub and their text editor/IDE… and this new capital will help make that vision a reality. Chad Pytel at thoughtbot, many of the NextView portfolio companies, tens of thousands of developers, and I are already believers.