TaskTop Technologies, a startup out of Vancouver that created a software development toolkit integration technology, has raised $11 million from Austin Ventures , based in Austin, Texas, and Yaletown Venture Partners.
The company has offices in both Vancouver and Austin.
The subject matter might not be the most exciting stuff you’ve ever read about, but the back-story is a little more interesting. The startup was founded seven and a half years ago out of the University of British Columbia (UBC), by Mik Kersten, Gail Murphy and Rob Elves. “UBC has been a huge part of what we are, what we’ve been and what we will be,” wrote president
The company made a decision to raise money at the end of 2013 after bootstrapping up to 70 employees. “The cool thing was that we could have kept growing without raising money. We made a choice because we felt that the opportunity to change how software was built was so big and the foundation we had put in place was so solid, that it was time to add a catalyst to our business,” wrote Choksi.
Their customers, he wrote, wanted more from the startup’s offerings.
When companies purchase Tasktop Sync or Tasktop Dev, “they get software that pays for itself in the quarter it was purchased in,” he wrote. “We need to get these innovations into the hands of even more organizations so that more of our colleagues who build software for banks, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, government, retail, and the like can do it at the increasingly rapid pace demanded by today’s marketplace. We are proud that our customers get increased visibility into their software manufacturing processes, see improved collaboration between the various stakeholders involved in delivering software and get home to their families in time for dinner because they’ve been so productive during the day. So we will grow geographically, adding more local presences around the globe.”
Moreover, TaskTop will beef up its integrations portfolio, providing coverage for the top 80 percent of the market leading tools in every category it supports (project/portfolio management, requirements management, Agile planning, change management, test / quality assurance, and help desk / ITSM).
The company will also consider adding integrations into adjacent markets based on customer demand. “In essence, we have raised funding to do a lot more of what we’ve been doing. That also means we will maintain the discipline that allowed us to bootstrap the business through the ups and downs of the past 7.5 years.”
