source{d} is a Spanish startup founded by Jorge Schruna and Eiso Kant, who met studying an MBA in the IE Business School a few years ago. Before source{d}, these entrepreneurs along with Philip von Have launched Tyba, the biggest platform in Europe for finding jobs in startups.
Tyba was one of the winners at the South Summit event in 2013. Five years later, they sold the company to Graduateland, the leading job search site for recent university graduates. They didn`t make the amount of the sale public.
Source{d} has built the first AI (Artificial Intelligence project) that understands code, by applying neural networks to analyse over 17 million software repositories from more than 6,6 million developers. Through this they are able to match developers with the right projects and teams. They are based in Madrid, with offices in Berlin and San Francisco but they serve clients worldwide.
The company was created in 2015, and six months later they announced the first investment round of $6mm where the VCs Otium Venture and Sunstone Capital participated, and the business angels Xavier Niel, Fabien Potencier, Eduardo Ronzanoand Ian Quest contributed. They mainly invested the money in growing their engineering team.
Jorge, the CEO’s of source{d}, says: “We are a company made for Developers, by Developers. Everytime we do something we ask ourselves if we’re putting developers front and centre. If we’re not then we’re doing something we shouldn’t be. In order to achieve this we only hire people who can understand developers, which is where ‘By Developers’ comes into play. We only hire people who are either Computer Scientists, self-taught developers or people with such a strong engineering and developer mindset that they’ll be able to fit here. This last group we take through a Computer Science and Coding program that we’ve developed so that they learn everything they need to be able to understand developers.”
Like in any startup, the most imporant thing is the business model. Jorge explains to StartupsReal: “For our recruitment business we used to charge a hiring commission over the gross annual salary of the candidate. Even though this brought us to breakeven we decided to continue doing this for free!”
THE COMPANY`S NAME
The first application of their technology was recruitment, also called sourcing. Given this and the fact that they analyse source code they thought using the word ‘sourced’ and dividing it like source{d} (‘source’ from ‘source code’ and ‘d’ from ‘developers’), they thought it would make for an interesting name. It contains:
- source d(evelopers)
- sourced as in recruited
- source from source code
Jorge explains, “What we didn’t think is that it would cause confusion as people pronounce it often as ‘source d’ instead of ‘sourced’.” Nowdays source{d} is one of the most promising startups in Spain. They won the Talent Summit last year and their aims for the next months will beworking on Step 2 of their vision, which is to create a fully functional assisted-coding AIto empower developers and help them be more effective.