Miami startup Moderne raises $15M to bring continuous software modernization to market

By Nancy Dahlberg

Moderne, a startup that relocated to Miami from Seattle a year ago, aims to solve the laborious, manual tasks of software development that suck the productivity out of developers. The company says it accelerates software development through continuous software modernization across an organization’s codebase, freeing developers to focus on innovating and creating great software.

Moderne announced today it raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Intel Capital with participation from True Ventures, Mango Capital and Allstate Strategic Ventures. The Series A allows Moderne to grow its customer base, build on its technology offering, and do opportunistic hiring of developers. The startup has raised $20 million to date.

“Code volume, variety and velocity continue to grow exponentially,  making code automation more important than ever, especially when keeping software upgraded and secure is harder than ever.  Moderne automates software refactoring and migration to empower developers to spend their valuable time building the new instead of tediously maintaining the old,” said Nick Washburn, Senior Managing Director at Intel Capital, who will be joining Moderne’s board of directors.

Moderne was founded in 2020 by Jonathan Schneider and Olga Kundzich. Schneider said they built a solution based on some of the work that Schneider had done as an engineer working at Netflix.

“We’re automating source code fixes, we’re remediating the source code. We really are the ‘do it for me’ of modernization and security and custom applications,” said Schneider, the CEO, in a short interview with Refresh Miami. “It’s just hard to fathom just how much source code every organization really has. One of our customers has 500 million lines of source code, which is just an unfathomable number. It’s crazy but that’s the situation at a bank or a retailer. It’s very common at this point.”

Continuous software modernization is a new category of software development tools that automates code migration and fixes across a company’s entire codebase, and Moderne is a first-mover in the space, the company says. This work that would normally take many months of manual effort can be automated and completed with a pull request in minutes, the company says.

Moderne’s customers include primarily large enterprises, including Allstate and Choice Hotels, as well as some SMEs. “Our smallest company is 70 developers, our largest is 6,000. Interestingly, they struggle with the same problems because they all depend on third party components. And when those components change, they have to go and restitch their applications again,” Schneider said.

Moderne is a 20-person distributed team. The co-founders moved to Miami in February 2022  from Seattle and hope to attract more team members to the Magic City. Schneider said it was “the great degree of vibrancy here” that pulled him to downtown Miami, though he considered New York City as well. “You can go to a tech meetup every Wednesday in Wynwood and there’s hundreds of people there. It makes quite a difference in terms of your ability to network and just be around like-minded people.”

Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter @ndahlberg and email her at [email protected]

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