Companies lose millions to ‘ghost engineers’: HackerPulse raises $1.5M to solve it

HackerPulse, a platform that gives technical leaders advanced visibility into engineering team performance, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by AltaIR Capital, with participation from Antler, DVC Fund and angel investors including 15 engineering leaders from Uber, Cloudflare, Deel, SpaceX, Google. The company equips engineering leaders with ML-powered tools to identify inefficiencies, streamline workflows, and optimise team structures.

Inefficiencies in engineering teams cost companies millions annually. Research from Stanford suggests that up to 9.5% of engineers contribute virtually no value (“ghost engineers”), while 25% act as “bureaucrats,” prioritising process over output. Analytics from traditional tools like Jira, GitHub, and Confluence offer fragmented data, making it difficult to assess team performance effectively.

HackerPulse creates insights based on data from the organisation's entire tool stack and can help both manage existing teams and create new ones, based on a deep understanding of team members, their skill sets, and their historical performance. Engineers gain visibility into their own impact, can track progress, optimise workflows, and reduce unnecessary toil. By combining development metrics with business data, managers can immediately see and understand how engineering decisions affect the entire company.

Developed with input from engineering leaders from Uber, Carta, and Cloudflare, the platform provides holistic metrics such as deployment frequency, time to release, development velocity, and workload balance through an interactive dashboard powered by natural language queries.

"HackerPulse doesn’t just help leaders; it empowers engineers by offering visibility into their own contributions. Engineers can track their growth, optimise workflows, and reduce firefighting with better focus time and balanced workloads, all while contributing to measurable outcomes for their teams and organisations," said Alberto Scherb, Co-Founder of HackerPulse.

"The shift to remote work has led to a loss of control over processes. Some engineers lose motivation, while others exploit this gap by taking on multiple full-time roles. HackerPulse enables managers to understand and improve team performance. AltaIR Capital is proud to support a company that's tackling one of the most pressing issues in tech today," said Igor Ryabenkiy, Founder and Managing Partner at AltaIR Capital.

"I met Gleb early in their journey and have witnessed firsthand how HackerPulse has rapidly evolved, continuously refining its approach to deeply understanding what engineering teams truly need. Their approach to engineering team productivity is transformative – leveraging AI to deliver actionable insights that empower engineering leaders to make smarter decisions and build high-performing teams. Gleb’s deep obsession with this problem, combined with an open and curious mindset, allows him to constantly learn and adapt to what customers genuinely need. We’re thrilled to back a team with such a clear vision and the ability to execute it," said Prerna Sharma, General Partner at Antler.

"Engineering leaders and their teams are under more pressure than ever to deliver better results, faster – but most leaders lack the visibility needed to deeply understand and optimise performance. HackerPulse changes that by turning fragmented engineering data into comprehensive, real-time and actionable insights. It redefines what it means to be a fully-informed engineering leader + decision-maker," said Rick Boone, Engineering Leader, ex. Meta/FB, Uber, Carta

"HackerPulse has enhanced our ability to evaluate team structures and ensure optimal alignment between talent and projects. It has advanced our team assembly capabilities by factoring in skills, workload, and contribution history to help us streamline engineering workflows and maximise operational efficiency," said Kris Evans, Head of Engineering at Terminal Industries.

The company is already working with several enterprise partners such as Preply, Coverflex, Terminal Industries, DiscoverCars and more. With $1.5 million in funding, HackerPulse is expanding its platform to serve larger teams, integrating additional tools and enhancing its AI-driven capabilities for proactive issue detection.

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