Jellyfish

Jellyfish operates a software engineering intelligence platform that ingests data from developer and business tools and converts it into metrics on engineering delivery, resource allocation, developer experience and, more recently, AI tool usage and return on investment. Originally positioned as an "Engineering Management Platform" — a category the company says it created — the product analyzes engineering signals alongside contextual business data to give leaders visibility into what engineering organizations are working on and how they operate.

Current platform use cases described by the company include allocating and tracking AI and engineering effort across custom categories, connecting AI spend and engineering effort to delivery outcomes, defining flexible delivery and investment metrics, analyzing how engineers prompt and structure AI interactions across the SDLC, gathering developer experience survey data, and automating financial reporting for software capitalization and R&D tax credits (marketed as DevFinOps). Earlier product documentation describes a strategic alignment dashboard showing how engineer time maps to business initiatives, including tracking of unused full-time-equivalents, and an Engineering & Product Operations dashboard covering structure, resource allocation, processes and tools. A Scenario Planner feature supports roadmap planning.

The platform integrates with source control and work-tracking systems (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Jira, Linear, Azure DevOps/Repos/Boards), CI and incident tools (Jenkins, CircleCI, PagerDuty, Opsgenie), product planning tools (Productboard, ProductPlan, Aha!), code quality and review tools (SonarQube, Greptile, CodeRabbit), collaboration tools (Slack, Google Sheets, Google Calendar) and AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini, Amazon Q, Cursor, Sourcegraph, Windsurf, Claude).

Founding story

Jellyfish was founded in 2017 (Contrary Research gives January 2017) by Andrew Lau (co-founder and CEO), Phil Braden and David Gourley. The three had previously worked together at Endeca Technologies, which Oracle acquired in 2011 for $1 billion: Gourley co-founded Endeca, Braden was a founding team member and its first product manager, and Lau joined as an intern and became VP of Engineering. Gourley later served as VP of Engineering at Groupon and co-authored a book on HTTP; Lau became Chief Strategy Officer at Nanigans; Braden was a General Manager at Fishbowl Marketing. Over dinner at a Boston sushi restaurant the trio compared engineering management to the state of sales management before Salesforce and Siebel Systems, and concluded that engineering was the one business function that had not gained visibility connecting its operations to business purpose. After more than 60 customer discovery interviews they found executives struggled to drive productivity and demonstrate engineering's business impact. The name Jellyfish was initially a placeholder chosen from a list of plants and animals for its associations with flexibility, dynamism and transparency, and was kept because of its popularity.

Business model

Jellyfish sells a B2B SaaS platform to engineering organizations. The product connects to customers' existing developer and business tools and delivers dashboards, metrics and reporting; go-to-market runs through demo requests and an interactive product tour on the company website. Sources do not disclose pricing or contract structure.

Software subscription revenue from enterprise engineering organizations; the sources do not state pricing tiers or specific revenue figures beyond the statement that revenue more than tripled in 2021.

Traction

Contrary Research listed 208 employees and about $115 million in total funding as of June 2023. In 2021 the company more than tripled revenue and tripled its team, adding hundreds of new customers. Publicly named users include Mastercard, Toast, Bazaarvoice, ZoomInfo, Priceline, PagerDuty, Hootsuite, Box, LastPass, TaskRabbit, Kaleris, Siigo, Loadsmart and ZenQMS. Customer-reported outcomes cited on the company site include a 30% increase in team performance (Siigo) and 30-40% shorter issue lifecycles after AI adoption (LastPass). Glassdoor figures shown on the company's about page are a 4.7 rating, 91% would recommend to a friend and 100% CEO approval.

Latest developments

The company has repositioned around AI-integrated engineering, marketing itself as "The Intelligence Platform for AI-Integrated Engineering" with capabilities for tracking AI spend and token usage, measuring AI ROI, observing agentic workflows across the SDLC, and analyzing how engineers use AI coding assistants. Recent newsroom items announce an end-to-end view of AI's impact on productivity, quality and value across the SDLC, a survey finding that software engineers are becoming strategic business partners, and the appointment of Chris Ward as Chief Revenue Officer.