Israeli startup Milestone has raised $10 million in seed funding to tackle a growing challenge in the age of generative AI: measuring its real impact on software development. The company’s platform is designed to connect AI tool usage with key engineering metrics like code quality, feature delivery speed, and bug rates—providing organizations with clear data on return on investment. Despite the widespread adoption of AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, which now has over 20 million users, most companies still lack visibility into how these tools are being used and whether they’re actually improving productivity. Milestone addresses this gap by building what its CEO and co-founder Liad Elidan calls a “genAI data lake,” integrating data from codebases, project management tools, team structures, and the AI code-generation tools themselves. To make this work, Milestone requires access to customers’ codebases—a condition that initially raised concerns among early investors. But with clients including Kayak, Monday, and Sapiens, the startup has proven its model’s value. The funding round, led by San Francisco-based Heavybit and Israeli venture firm Hanaco Ventures, also includes participation from Atlassian Ventures, the venture arm of the company behind Jira. Elidan and Milestone’s CTO, Professor Stephen Barrett, built the company across continents. Barrett, based in Ireland and a former professor of Elidan’s at Trinity College Dublin, had never met in person until fundraising began. Their long-standing academic and professional bond helped shape a vision focused on engineering efficiency at a time when AI is transforming how software is built. As AI tools evolve—from simple auto-completion to agentic workflows—Milestone must keep pace. Elidan notes that the shift is not just technological but cultural: “AI is filling out the team, and engineers are now becoming managers.” Barrett’s academic background helps the team anticipate and understand these changes. The platform has already formed partnerships with key players in the dev tool ecosystem, including GitHub, Augment Code, Qodo, Continue, and Atlassian. The round also attracted notable angel investors such as GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, former AT&T CEO John Donovan, Accenture’s Paul Daugherty, and Datadog’s ex-president Amit Agrawal—individuals who recognize the enterprise relevance of Milestone’s mission. From the start, Milestone chose to focus exclusively on enterprise clients, turning down smaller prospects despite the difficulty. This discipline helped define a clear roadmap centered on enterprise-grade security, compliance, and integration. The company plans to stay focused on engineering and will not expand into other departments like marketing, even as it grows. For Elidan, the key lesson for founders is focus. “We don’t have a customer that used Milestone and said, ‘GenAI doesn’t help me, I’m going to stop using it,’” he said. “In fact, they want to try more tools. The real question is not whether AI helps—but how much, and where.”