Hiphops raises $650K pre-seed round, co-led by firstminute Capital & Seedcamp to automate how code is released

LONDON, 13 June 2022. Hiphops, which automates the complex business of releasing code, is emerging from stealth today and announcing a $3.5 million pre-seed round co-led by firstminute Capital & Seedcamp with participation from Tiny VC, RLC Ventures, and prominent Angel investors such as Matt Robinson, Will Neale, and Jack Kleeman.

Hiphops is addressing a huge pain point in software development today, which is releasing code. Often code that takes days to write can take weeks or even months to go live due to byzantine release processes, particularly for very regulated industries such as banks. Hiphops is a low-code SaaS that automates reviews, release notes and crucially provides the ability to understand the impact of a software change to save time and money across a business.

Tom Manterfield, Hiphops CEO, encountered this problem throughout his career building neo banks and leading digital transformation at multi billion dollar companies, where he repeatedly ran into this huge bottleneck remaining in the software development process. “Despite the massive improvements and efficiencies in coding we’ve seen over the past few years, once code is finished there’s still a painful amount of effort required before it’s in the customers hands.”

He adds: “Hiphops saves engineering teams time and money by automating away the manual effort that exists between code complete and code delivered, starting with ML change analysis, automated labelling and automated approvals. All tech teams have experienced the frustration of having finished the code but not the job ”

Michael Stothard from firstminute capital, a $315 million European seed fund which is backed by 120 unicorn tech founders, said: “We invest in founders who are committed to building a solution to a problem that they’ve lived and that so the Hiphops team and story resonated with us. Freeing tech teams from manual effort means that more tech can be delivered faster and with more control. HipHops can define a whole new category in software development.”

Kate McGinn from seedcamp said: “Hiphops helps companies reduce their risk, increase control and maintain speed of code release so that developers can spend more of what they love: build products. We are thrilled to back Tom, Michelle, and Yang as they embark on this vision.”

Hiphops was founded by Manterfield alongside Yang Li and Michelle Arnold. Li has survived an IPO and two acquisitions, as CGO he successfully helped Ziglu grow to 100,000 customers in the first year and raise £20M in funding. Yang is one of the 2021 Forbes 30 under 30 cohort. Arnold listed a Bank on Nasdaq and has led and scaled operations, communications and sales in successful startups. She was COO of Ziglu at launch, which has just been acquired by Robinhood.

Hiphops saves engineering teams time and money by automating away the huge manual effort that exists between writing code and getting that code live. Hiphops automatically tracks, analyses, categorises and automates all software releases with our out of the box automations, 97% accurate ML pipeline and ability to operate with metadata access only. Founded by software engineer Tom Manterfield as well as Yang Li and Michelle Arnold, it is a one stop tool so teams can spend more time writing code and less on the admin of getting it live.

Hiphops has raised funding from venture capital firms including firstminute capital and Seedcamp as well as angels such as Matt Robinson, Will Neale, and Jack Kleeman

firstminute Capital is a $315m AUM venture fund, investing in seed stage tech companies. firstminute is sector agnostic and invests across the UK, Europe and the US. Backed by over 120 unicorn founders and founded by Brent Hoberman (founder of lastminute.com, made.com, Founders Forum) and Spencer Crawley (Goldman Sachs, DMC Partners) in 2017, firstminute has invested in over 100 companies.

Seedcamp is Europe's seed fund, identifying and investing early in world-class founders attacking large, global markets and solving real problems using technology. The Seedcamp Nation includes over 430 startups building breakout businesses that change the way people live, interact and buy and includes publicly listed UiPath, Wise, and unicorns Revolut, Hopin, Sorare, Pleo, wefox, Grover and viz.ai along with fast-growing businesses such as Ezra, THIS and Synthesia. Seedcamp fast-tracks a founder's vision and creates value through immediate access to smart capital, a lifelong community of support, and a global network built upon more than a decade's experience backing exceptional talent.