If you have an encoding problem, a Google search will most likely take you to Stack Overflow. The programming-focused question and answer is the 45th most popular site in the world, according to Alexa Rank. “No other company or organization has the length of the network we have in the generation industry,” says CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar. “Every developer knows who we are.”
The transition from the Covid-19 pandemic to remote paintings has only strengthened Stack Overflow’s position in engineering circles. From April to June, there was an average of 200,000 new users per month, the most productive quarter in the history of the new 12-year-old New York company, Chandrasekar said. This call is generating increased interest in venture capital: Stack Overflow announced Tuesday that it had raised $85 million as a component of an E Series investment round.
The first fundraising event for Stack Overflow in five years, the new investment circular was directed through GIC, the Singapore government’s wealth fund, with more investments from Silver Lake Waterman and previous investors Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Spark Capital and Square Union Ventures. GIC investor Ethel Chen will join the start-up’s board along with Chandrasekar, who became a director after signing to obtain the CEO position in October 2019. The company refused to disclose its new valuation, but Chandrasekar said it was an “important step forward” to its position. -D Series rating, which was $459 million, according to PitchBook.
With this funding, Stack Overflow plans to focus more on some other component of its business: a software-as-a-service edition of its popular tool among corporations going through virtual transformations. This product, Stack Overflow for Teams, was announced in 2018 and is proposed as a personal edition of the Stack Overflow site, which provides internal communication and documentation that make it an internal repository of sensitive corporate knowledge. “What we started to realize in 2017 is that for giant corporations, 60% to 70% of what they were looking for for percentage of data was personal data, such as a code that was very expressive to them,” chandrasekar explains.
Demand for the Teams product exceeded Stack Overflow’s forecasts, says Teresa Dietrich, recently hired product manager. She attributes this increased use to demanding situations of remote integration and exhaustion prevention, a centralized wisdom base that relieves others who in a different way would have to continually answer the same questions on discussion platforms like Slack.
Teams is used lately through thousands of corporations, adding the Zapier startup and Bloomberg and Microsoft corporations, according to Stack Overflow, and has doubled its profits every year since its launch. The startup expects Teams to account for about one-third of its overall earnings by 2020; Stack Overflow reports that annual recurring product earnings are expected to reach $27 million this year.
Former senior vice president of corporate Rackspace in the cloud, Chandrasekar took over stack overflow co-founder and CEO Joel Spolsky in October and made a number of adjustments to the startup’s control team to focus more on the opportunity of enterprise software. In May, the corporation reduced its workforce by 15%, or 40 employees, as first reported through Business Insider, in a movement that, according to the corporation, basically affected its recruitment activity, which had faltered as corporations reduced recruitment by the pandemic.
Stack Overflow’s other sources of earnings, adding advertising to its public Q&A site and group businesses, performed better as a result of the spread of the coronavirus, Chandrasekar said. In a recent Teams deal, he said the company had hired a monetary company for 40,000 more positions.
For the new CEO of Stack Overflow, it’s the opportunity at Teams that can help the company, now a little long in the tooth for a new venture capital firm, to finally target an IPO. “We are looking to expand our organization this year as a year of basic transformation. Next year will be a year of high growth, etc.,” says Chandrasekar. “That’s the concept, we have to make it public.”
I am an assistant editor founded in San Francisco for generation and innovation. I report basically on startups and synthetic intelligence. In the past, I used to make stops in the
I am an assistant editor founded in San Francisco for generation and innovation. I report basically on startups and synthetic intelligence. I used to prevent in The Ringer and Raleigh News – Observer. I graduated in 2019 from Duke University, where I spent time as editor of The Chronicle, the university’s independent news organization. You can email me at kcai [at] forbes.com.