Docbot Labs, an eight-month-old startup building knowledge stack infrastructure for ambitious product teams, has raised £580,000 in a pre-seed round of funding.
The round was led by Frontline Ventures, with participation from Ascension, Concept Ventures, and Charlotte Street Capital. A host of prominent angel investors also participated in the round, including GoCardless founder Matt Robinson.
Founded by Jamie Davenport in February 2022, Docbot Labs helps product teams be more productive through better knowledge sharing practices.
The product was born out of his frustration with trying to source, navigate and manage internal documentation whilst working as a software engineer at various fast-growing companies, most recently at Otta.
High-growth startups and scaleups are particularly prone to substandard documentation systems, where content is frequently outdated and hard to find, meaning quick questions result in a tedious search for answers.
“Knowledge sharing can become dependent on individual tech leads who develop a comprehensive understanding of how a technology is built, and often take it with them when they move on to new roles, leaving the next crop of engineers without essential context,” explained Davenport.
“On an individual basis, it’s highly frustrating and disruptive. On a team-wide scale, it creates a critical productivity issue for a business.”
According to the startup, difficulties in information sharing became even more pronounced during the pandemic when it was no longer possible to find an answer by asking the person across the desk. It’s now becoming a long-term issue as hybrid and remote setups become the norm for development teams.
Over Christmas 2021, Davenport built a knowledge management tool with best practices, observability and discoverability baked in. After onboarding the first early adopters in January, he decided to take the plunge and work on Docbot Labs full-time, and started fundraising in March.
Now backed by leading VCs and angel investors, the company is scaling with new design and engineer hires.
“I was extremely excited about Jamie’s vision for the product and the fact that he was building to solve a problem he had experienced himself,” said Robinson.
“As with all great SaaS businesses the team needs to start small and focused, but it’s a huge opportunity to build something important.
“With an ever expanding range of tools, and where employee tenure is shorter than ever and interactions are increasingly remote, centralising developer knowledge is clearly going to be a critical part of any good tech organisations developer toolkit moving forwards.”
Currently in Beta, Docbot Labs is onboarding new clients every day.
Its first product enables users to find relevant context and answers quickly, without migrating existing knowledge tools. Integrations with Github, Notion, Linear, Figma, Slack and Confluence are designed to enhance user workflows within a matter of minutes.
Docbot generates a knowledge graph and provides a simple interface to view active work, related documents, and important context with just a few clicks.
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