Codacy, a startup based in Lisbon, Portugal that offers what it calls an “automated code review platform,” has raised $5.1 million in Series A funding. EQT Ventures led the round, with participation from existing investors Faber, Caixa Capital, Join Capital, and Seedcamp.

Launched in 2014, Codacy says it has been used by hundreds of companies, name-checking Paypal, Adobe, Qlik, Cancer Research UK, and Deliveroo as customers. The software can be installed on-premise or accessed in the cloud and is used by developers to check the quality of code, and implement code quality standards.

“Code review has become an essential part of any development workflow and developers now spend more than 20 per cent of their time reviewing code to catch bugs as early as possible and ensure quality,” says Codacy co-founder Jaime Jorge. “With Codacy, we estimate that we help developers optimise around 30 per cent of their code review time”.

This, claims Jorge, sees engineering teams be more efficient by 6 per cent. Or, put in more tangible terms, can correspond to delivering software two weeks ahead of plan.

“More than code reviews, our mission is to achieve developer productivity through quality at scale. We do this by centralizing the most meaningful problems, alerts and metrics and completely integrating them into your workflow,” he says.

“As an example, as you are creating a pull request we can tell you that we’ve found a security vulnerability as well as tell you that your test coverage is almost at your team’s defined objective. We’re continually developing our product to ensure it’s best-in-class at helping developers understand their code quality and make great engineering decisions”.

Codacy customers range from small digital consultancy shops to large multinational corporations, and span multiple industries and geographies.

Direct competitors are cited as Code Climate, and Sonarqube, but Jorge claims customers choose Codacy because of the way it is integrated into their workflow, to the point of automatically syncing with their favorite tools such as Github Enterprise. “This is particularly useful for our very large customers,” he adds.

Meanwhile, the new round of funding will be used to further build out the team to enable Codacy to expand its offering to a broader base of customers. The company currently employs 13 people and says it is hiring in the areas of software engineering, customer success, sales and marketing.