Periscope Co-founder Secures $40M for Code Tracking Startup, Macroscope

Kayvon Beykpour, a decade after selling Periscope to Twitter for a reported $100 million, is back in the startup game with Macroscope, a platform aiming to revolutionize software development workflows. The acquisition of Periscope in 2015 marked Twitter’s foray into livestreaming, a venture that ultimately led to the platform’s sunsetting in 2021 as X, under Elon Musk’s ownership, shifted focus to Spaces.

Beykpour, who remained at Twitter for seven years post-acquisition, announced Wednesday that Macroscope has secured $40 million in funding from prominent venture capital firms, including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Thrive Capital. This injection of capital underscores the significant opportunity investors see in addressing the inefficiencies plaguing modern software development.

While Periscope targeted the consumer market, Macroscope is strategically positioned to serve businesses. The core concept revolves around providing software developers with tools to proactively identify and resolve coding issues, while simultaneously offering managers enhanced visibility into their engineering teams’ activities. This dual focus addresses a critical pain point: the lack of transparency in the software development lifecycle.

“So much of my job as head of product at Twitter was just understanding what the hell was happening,” Beykpour stated. “You have all these engineers at the company and all these very important things that we need to get done with absolute opaqueness around, like, What progress did we make? What are all these people working on?” This realization became the catalyst for Macroscope’s creation, initially focusing on solutions for product leaders before expanding its feature set for programmers.

Macroscope integrates seamlessly with industry-standard tools, including GitHub’s source code repositories (owned by Microsoft), and project management platforms from Atlassian and Linear. Notably, Macroscope leverages the power of artificial intelligence by connecting to AI models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. This enables the platform to offer intelligent code suggestions and answer queries from both developers and product executives, streamlining the development process and fostering a more collaborative environment. The integration of cutting-edge AI models suggests a future roadmap where Macroscope could proactively identify and address potential security vulnerabilities, performance bottlenecks, and scalability issues, offering a significant competitive advantage.

While existing products like GitHub Copilot and Cursor’s BugBot already leverage AI for code review, Beykpour asserts that Macroscope has demonstrated superior performance in accurately identifying known software bugs during internal testing. This suggests that Macroscope’s approach to AI-powered code analysis may be more sophisticated or tailored to specific industry needs.

Furthermore, Beykpour emphasizes the dearth of effective tools designed to help managers effectively monitor and understand developer activity. “They’re solving it with meetings,” he said. “If we cannot surpass the bar of, people call a meeting to ask a bunch of engineers what’s happening, we’ve failed miserably.” This highlights a significant gap in the management of software development teams, where frequent meetings often become a substitute for real-time visibility into progress and potential roadblocks.

Macroscope’s pricing structure is set at $30 per developer per month, encompassing status-checking capabilities for managers. In comparison, Cursor is priced at $32 per month with an annual commitment. Early adopters of the Macroscope platform include film studio A24, online learning startup Class, and probiotics company Seed Health, suggesting its appeal spans diverse industries struggling with software development transparency.

Founded in 2023 by Beykpour, Periscope co-founder Joseph Bernstein, and Rob Bishop, founder of AI startup Magic Pony (acquired by Twitter in 2016), Macroscope currently employs 17 individuals and is headquartered in San Francisco. The team’s combined expertise in livestreaming, social media, and artificial intelligence positions them favorably to navigate the complexities of the software development landscape and deliver a compelling value proposition to their target market. Their early success in attracting both funding and notable clients suggests Macroscope is poised to disrupt the way software is built and managed, offering greater efficiency, transparency, and collaboration in an increasingly competitive industry.