As the year comes to a close, I can honestly say that it’s been one heck of a year for Swimm in so many ways. I say this both in terms of Swimm’s rapid growth, our many accomplishments, and what’s coming up next on our roadmap.
The end of the year is often a time of reflection, and so on that note, I want to reflect just a bit by sharing some of our milestones in 2021.
1. Building a winning team
A year of tremendous growth for Swimm is an understatement – we have hired a strategic and talented cadre of Swimmers!
This year, we opened up Swimm’s New York office, and we are continuing to grow that team now. Moreover, our brand new Tel Aviv office is large enough to work together again under one roof. That has been personally satisfying – all of us gathered together, working hard on Swimm – including hosting meetups and Swimminars (and I’ll share that we held 14 Swimminars this past year).
After almost two years of Covid, being F2F is huge for all of us.
2. Two rounds of funding totaling $33.3 million
As a product led growth company, the word about Continuous Documentation is now out there, becoming an essential component of software development. I am beyond grateful that Swimm raised $33.3M this year; it’s astounding.
In January of 2021, we announced a $5.7 million seed round led by Pitango First, with TAU Ventures, Axon Ventures, and FundFire – and an amazing group of high-profile angel investors. And in November 2021, our Series A round, raising $27.6M led by New York-based global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners, with participation from Dawn Capital, alongside existing seed investors Pitango First and TAU Ventures.
Grateful to Swimm’s outstanding developer community, all our users and design partners – across the United States, Canada, Israel, and beyond. Our central community hub is strong and active on Slack, and your feedback about Swimm is driving us to push forward and constantly improve our customer experience.
There’s a lot of work – all the time – and we are motivated and energized every moment to Swimm the very best for dev communities worldwide.
3. Swimm’s open beta
Also, in November this year – we launched our free open beta, strengthening our product-led growth strategy enabling developers to test and adopt Swimm autonomously by creating documentation coupled with the code itself.
4. Swimm’s new features and improvements
Our team of developers has been busy this year. Here’s a quick look at the big highlights.
- Swimm’s Web App – we took Swimm to the web, and you can now connect to Swimm from any browser.
- VS Code and IntelliJ Extensions – With Swimm’s IDE extensions, you can consume documentation inline from within your IDE
- Smart Tokens – smart tokens allow Swimm to auto-sync even more of your code. Using smart tokens, you can now sync not just snippets but any symbol from within your code.
- Sw.md – All of your Swimm documents are now saved as Swimm Markdown files
- GitHub App – get insights directly in your PRs, allowing Swimm to integrate more closely with your workflow.
- Launch of Dark Mode – we prioritized this feature to create a better developer experience – and because everyone needs a dark mode!
5. Launching Swimm Upstream
Swimm’s community of tech leaders and engineers is growing strong, and just this month, we just launched Swimm Upstream, a podcast devoted to engineering leaders and dev tool enthusiasts and hosted by the talented Tom Ahi Dror.
You can find Swimm Upstream’s first season on Spotify and Apple, and I know you will thoroughly enjoy it.
6. So many cups of coffee
We drank countless (okay, let’s just say zillions) cups of coffee this year, thanks to our BariCTO, Omer Rosenbaum. It’s our Swimm tradition, and it’s absolutely daily: coffee together to start the day.
Our motto: No coffee = no code
We take our coffee seriously.
Looking ahead to 2022
I want to extend my sincerest thanks to my co-founders, Gilad Navot, Tom Ahi Dror, and Omer Rosenbaum, as well as our entire Swimm team including all Swimm managers – thank you for the opportunity to build Swimm with you and make a difference for developers everywhere.
We are ready to take on 2022. So yes, this will be a big year for us: our priority is to continue to learn from the beta while developing more features, prepare for Swimm’s big launch, and travel to our offices in NY. Don’t hesitate to be in touch; I want to make those meetings happen in person or virtually – whatever the situation allows – so keep the feedback coming.
Cheers to what’s ahead for us in the coming year!
Wait for some magic!
Oren
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