Macroscope employees.
Macroscope
It’s been a decade since Kayvon Beykpour sold Periscope to Twitter for a reported $100 million, allowing the social media site to jump into livestreaming.
Twitter shuttered Periscope in 2021, and the parent company, now called X and owned by Elon Musk, gravitated to a live events product called Spaces.
Meanwhile, Beykpour, who spent seven years at Twitter after the acquisition, is back with Macroscope. He said on Wednesday that he’s raised $40 million from venture investors, including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Lightspeed Venture Partners and Thrive Capital.
While Periscope targeted a consumer audience, Macroscope is going squarely after businesses. Beykpour’s idea is to help software developers easily spot issues in their code, and show managers what their engineers are doing.
Beykpour said the lack of transparency in the software development process was a big problem in his former gig.
“So much of my job as the head of product at Twitter was just understanding what the hell was happening,” Beykpour, said in an interview. “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?”
He said the startup set out to help product leaders first and added features for programmers later.
Macroscope integrates with Microsoft-owned GitHub’s source code repositories and project management software from Atlassian and Linear. Its technology connects to artificial intelligence models from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI that can propose alternative code and answer questions from developers and product executives.
Products like GitHub Copilot and Cursor’s BugBot already can review code with help from AI. Beykpour said that in testing Macroscope outperformed competitors when it came to correctly identifying known software bugs.
And when it comes to tools to help managers stay on top of developers’ activity, there’s not much available, Beykpour said.
“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.”
Macroscope costs $30 per developer per month, which includes the status-checking components for bosses, while Cursor is priced at $32 per month when purchased annually.
Early users include film studio A24, online learning startup Class and probiotics company Seed Health.
Beykpour started Macroscope in 2023 with Periscope co-founder Joseph Bernstein and Rob Bishop, founder of AI startup Magic Pony, which Twitter acquired in 2016. The company has 17 employees and is based in San Francisco.
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