A Milestone Built on Purpose Today marks a significant milestone for Unblocked: we’re announcing our Series A funding round. This blog post takes that opportunity to reflect on why we started Unblocked, what we’ve built so far, where we’re headed - and why all of that matters for the future of software development teams.
From the beginning, we set out with a clear purpose: to help developers get unblocked by providing the missing context behind their code. From late-night debugging sessions to onboarding new engineers to legacy projects, our team has felt the frustration first-hand of code that works but isn’t understood.
We’ve seen how much time and energy teams waste digging through old commit messages, outdated documentation, or Slack threads just to answer the question, “Why does it work this way?”
It’s a real, widespread problem. In the most recent StackOverflow Developer Survey (65,000+ participants), 63% of developers said they spend 30-120+ minutes every day searching for answers about their codebase.
Unblocked exists to close that gap, helping teams move faster by making critical context easy to find - a challenge that’s only growing as AI generates more code.
What We’ve Built So Far (and How It’s Used Today)
Over the last couple of years, we’ve built a product that gives software teams immediate insight into their code.
At its core, Unblocked is a contextual code intelligence platform that surfaces the knowledge developers need - right when and where they need it. It connects scattered information across the tools teams already use, providing rich context about
One of our customers told us that Unblocked felt like having a “another expert on the team, available 24/7" sitting beside each developer, whispering important background information when needed. New hires at that company use Unblocked to onboard themselves, exploring the codebase with guidance while learning how different components work together.
For many teams, when someone says they’re stuck on a mysterious bit of code, the default answer is now: “Have you checked Unblocked?” - a testament to how our tool has become part of the team’s workflow.
Seeing real-world usage like this has been incredibly validating - it’s addressing a genuine pain point for developers and engineering managers alike.
And we’re just getting started.
Why Contextual Code Intelligence Matters Now More Than Ever We’ve always believed that contextual code intelligence is going to play an increasingly critical role in software development. A developer should have the relevant context for any piece of code readily available - not just the code itself. This includes the intent behind the code, its history, its connections to other parts of the system, and any discussion or documentation around it.
This has always been important, but recent changes in our industry have made it absolutely vital. Consider the following trends that are widening the gap between code authorship and code understanding:
Explosion of AI-Generated Code: AI is producing code faster than ever - often without the design rationale or human context behind it. What boosts productivity now can leave future developers (or AIs) struggling to understand it. Without the why , even working code becomes hard to maintain. Contextual intelligence fills in those gaps by capturing the intent behind every change - whether written by a person or a model so that maintainers aren’t left guessing.Developers Move On, Code Lives On: Original authors rarely maintain their code over time due to frequent team or job changes. Crucial knowledge easily leaves with them, forcing future maintainers into “archaeological digs” through commit logs, sparse comments and documentation systems. Many teams describe maintaining an old system as “decoding hieroglyphs” because so much context has been lost. Future maintainers deserve to know why the code is the way it is, not just see the code itself.Rising Code Complexity and Volume: Modern systems are sprawling: microservices, APIs, open-source libraries, millions of lines of code. No one can hold it all in their head. Unblocked acts as a map, helping developers navigate complexity with confidence. As the volume of code in the world accelerates, largely thanks to both human and AI productivity, having such a “map” isn’t a luxury - it’s quickly becoming a necessity for sane software engineering.We believe software development needs to evolve . While the industry has invested heavily in tools for writing and shipping code, it’s done far less to help developers understand it over time. Contextual code intelligence helps restore that balance - empowering developers not just to build, but to sustain complex systems. Just as version control and automated testing became essential, we believe context will become a core part of every workflow so no developer is left wondering, “What does this code do, and why?”
Series A: Fueling Our Mission Raising a Series A isn’t the goal of a company; it’s fuel for the journey. The confidence that our customers and investors have shown in Unblocked is validating, but more importantly it provides us the resources to turn our vision into reality faster and more effectively.
How will we use this funding? In practical terms, here’s what the Series A enables us to do next:
Expand and Refine the Product: We plan to deepen Unblocked’s capabilities and make it even more intelligent and seamless. This means investing in our core contextual intelligence engine and expanding Unblocked capabilities to the runtime components of an application (AWS, GCP, DataDog etc). We believe that automating tasks for developers requires both content from static data sources and their runtime environments. You can see these efforts with our Autonomous CI Triage feature (and there is more to come).Deeper Integration with Developers’ Workflows: Context is only useful if it’s available at the right moment. With additional resources, we’ll work on deeper integrations into the tools where developers spend their time. Our plan is to collaborate with other tool vendors and open-source projects so that Unblocked’s contextual insights can show up wherever code is being read and written.Grow the Team and Community: Building something as ambitious as a “collective memory” for code requires great people. We’ll also invest in our early adopter community, sharing knowledge about best practices in maintaining code, and continuing to open source components of our platform. The Series A gives us the runway to not only build a business, but to cultivate a community of practice around code intelligence.Next steps To our early users and supporters - thank you. Your feedback shaped what Unblocked is today and will guide us into what it becomes tomorrow.
We’re determined to justify the faith that our new investors and community have placed in us by building something valuable and enduring. We chose our investors because they understand this vision, are aligned with our long-term thinking, and some of them are former engineers who have personally felt the pain of lost context!
We’re building toward a world where developers can quickly understand any codebase - even if they didn’t write it. That vision won’t happen overnight, and it won’t happen through Unblocked alone.
If you’re a curious user, a tool-maker thinking about integration, or even a skeptic (we see you, “good code should be self-explanatory” crowd), we’d love to hear from you.
I’m excited about our next chapter and to a future where no developer stays stuck for long.
Finally, as a thank you for reading this and for being part of the journey - if you're within the first 100 people to reach out to me , we'll donate $250 (under your name) to the charity of your choice. Really!
