Stack Overflow raises $85M in Series E funding for its SaaS collaboration platform for development teams

The last time we covered Stack Overflow was back in January when the New York-based tech startup and the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share​ ​their programming ​knowledge, announced the appointment of Teresa Dietrich as Chief Product Officer.

Back in May 2018, Stack Overflow rolled out its Stack Overflow for Teams, a private and internal platform designed to help development teams find answers to questions quickly without disrupting their workflow. Stack Overflow for Teams integrates with existing tools such as Slack in order to promote communication and efficiency, the company explained. “By and large, developers just want to get on with their work,” said Joel Spolsky, co-founder and CEO of Stack Overflow.

Today, Stack Overflow announced it has raised $85 million in Series E funding to accelerate the company’s SaaS knowledge management and collaboration offering, Stack Overflow for Teams. The round was led by GIC with participation from new investor Silver Lake Waterman and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, and Union Square Ventures (USV). The latest round brings Stack Overflow’s total funding to $153 million.

A collaboration platform for developers and technologists to break down silos and work asynchronously to ship products faster, accelerate onboarding, improve customer experience and drive innovation, Stack Overflow for Teams is used by thousands of companies including Bloomberg, Elastic, Expensify, Microsoft, Wix and Zapier. Stack Overflow for Teams is seeing rapid adoption as startups and large enterprises embrace platforms to streamline developer and technologist workflows and integrate tools for transparency, security and communication. Over 200,000 paid users across more than 5,000 teams use the platform across Engineering, Product Management, Data Science and Customer Support.

Founded in 2008 by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, Stack Overflow is the largest, most trusted online community for anyone that codes to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. More than 120 million unique visitors come to Stack Overflow each month to help solve coding problems, develop new skills, and find job opportunities, making it one of the 50 most-visited websites in the world.

To date, Stack Overflow partners with top companies such as Microsoft, Wix, Expensify, and more to help them enable, understand, hire, and engage the world’s developers, with products and services focused on knowledge sharing and collaboration, developer marketing, advertising, and technical recruiting. Stack Overflow is headquartered in New York, with offices in London and Munich.

“This $85 million in new funding, fueled by the growth of Stack Overflow for Teams, allows Stack Overflow to scale rapidly, to accelerate our transformation into a leading SaaS company, to expand into new markets, and to continue to invest in our public platform and the community that is the foundation of our company,” said Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar. As part of the recent financing, Chandrasekar will join the board of Stack Overflow. A senior leader and cloud veteran from Rackspace, he was appointed CEO of the company in October 2019.

COVID-19 has reshaped what the future of work looks like, with a recent Gartner poll showing that 48% of employees will likely work remotely at least part of the time after COVID-19 versus 30% before the pandemic. Stack Overflow for Teams addresses this emerging customer need by connecting distributed employees and enabling them to easily access a central source of knowledge to unlock information. Forrester’s The Total Economic Impact of Stack Overflow for Teams report found the product has an ROI of 179% for organizations that use it.

“Stack Overflow for Teams makes it easy for our developers to find the information they need quickly. It reduces the repetition of questions internally and eliminates cross-functional silos,” said Chris Thomas, Managing Director at Moody’s Analytics, a customer of Stack Overflow. “Stack Overflow for Teams helps us drive more collaboration and innovation at Moody’s Analytics, especially as we’ve gone fully remote.”