Fintech giant Stripe has acquired Okay, a startup that developed low-code analytics software to help engineers better understand how their teams are performing, the companies told TechCrunch exclusively.
Founded in 2019, Okay participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 cohort and then raised a total of $6.6 million in capital from the likes of Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.
Angel investors include executives from Plaid, Brex and Instacart, along with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison.
Financial terms of the deal, which marks Stripe’s first acquisition since it bought card reader provider BBPOS in January 2022, were not disclosed.
Box Boulanger
Co-founders Antoine Boulanger (CEO) and Tomas Barreto (CTO) met while working at Box Boulanger as Senior Director of Engineering and Barreto as VP of Engineering.
Prior to founding Okay, Boulanger worked as a senior technical manager at Google, and Barreto was VP of product and engineering at Checkr.
In 2020, the pair told TechCrunch that in the process of building a set of custom tools designed to help managers at Box better understand their teams.
They realized an opportunity for a subscription toolkit that could help managers across companies. For the most part, Boulanger says, Okay was designed to largely replace tools that were made in-house.
Toolkits
Getting a picture of the engineering team’s productivity involves engaging with Okay toolkits and gathering data into a digestible feed.
Dashboards can be built on data from developer tools like GitHub and Jira.
In short, Okay was focused on giving companies a way to build engineering efficiency dashboards over developer tools.
“We use metrics and data to make the engineering team more efficient and effective,” Boulanger told TechCrunch.
“It looks very similar to Mixpanel or Amplitude, but it’s used for engineering work.
The difference is that we’re very focused on finding the bottlenecks that affect engineers in their day-to-day activities more on their input rather than outputs like lines of code.”
Of course, now that it’s been acquired by Stripe, Okay will transition from serving its other customers – which have included Brex, and Plaid.
Intercom
Intercom in the past to serve Stripe exclusively. Okay had seven employees before the acquisition. The co-founders declined to share whether all seven employees will join Stripe.
“Our approach aligns with Stripe’s engineering values: by making engineering more efficient, Stripe will be better positioned to attract and retain talented engineers,” Boulanger said.
While Okay doesn’t share any recent revenue metrics, it told TechCrunch in February 2022 that its revenue and customer base grew about 10-fold, including the addition of customers like Sourcegraph and mParticle.
It was at Stripe’s 2022 showcase that the small startup “really hit it off with the front-line engineers.
From there it evolved into more of an acquisition discussion,” Boulander said. As a SaaS company, Okay made money by selling subscriptions. to its software.
“Stripe was the type of customer we were serving,” Boulanger said.
IPO
“Typically these were pre-IPO companies with hundreds to thousands of engineers where the manager wanted to start watching what others were doing and looking for tools to help them make decisions.”
Today, Okay is integrated into Stripe’s engineering department.
Boulanger said that before this acquisition, Okay had regular conversations with other potential acquirers, but concluded that “Stripe was really special.”
Stripe, which is one of the most valuable private companies in the world, has had some problems as the payments space in which it operates continues to grow and the IPO market dries up.
In the past year alone, companies like Plaid and Finix, for example, have released competing products. And Stripe, which has yet to go public via a long-awaited IPO.
Raised $6.5 billion earlier this year at a $50 billion valuation after being valued at $95 billion in March 2021.
1,120 workers, or 14% of its workforce, in November 2022 after it said it “took over for the world we’re in”.
Sources: Techcrunch | Newswav