Funds managed by YFM Equity Partners (YFM) have led a £4.5m investment round into Plandek, a DevOps analytics platform that enables technology teams to deliver quality software faster and more predictably.

Trading since 2018 and set up by second-time tech entrepreneurs, Charlie Ponsonby and Dan Lee, Plandek ‘lifts the lid’ on the software development process to track and drive improvement in software delivery speed, quality and predictability.

Plandek works by mining data from development teams’ DevOps toolsets to provide intelligent insight across the end-to-end software delivery process. The platform is stack agnostic, highly configurable and uses a proprietary data model to surface engineering, delivery and DevOps metrics and intelligent analytics that help teams accelerate value delivery.

The platform is used by enterprise customers globally in the private and public sectors and widely across PE-owned portfolio companies, including by over ten Hg Capital portfolio companies. Plandek is also recognised as a ‘leading global vendor’ in the fast-growing area of DevOps known as ‘Value Stream Management’ by Gartner and Forrester.

The growth capital investment provided by YFM through its British Smaller Companies VCTs will enable the business to scale up its sales and marketing capacity and continue to invest ahead of the curve in product leadership.

Plandek CEO, Charlie Ponsonby, who previously founded Simplifydigital which was subsequently acquired by Dixons Carphone, said: “Effective technology delivery is mission critical for most organisations, hence the explosion of interest in applying data science to optimise the end-to-end software delivery process. Plandek is the only UK company recognised as a leading global vendor in the space. Our intelligent analytics helps software delivery teams deliver value faster and more predictably as Plandek continues to lead the data science revolution in DevOps.

“This fund raise enables us to leverage our global reputation – by extending our intelligent analytics IP and scaling our sales and marketing effort across Europe and North America. We were looking for a thoughtful investment partner who is in it for the long-term to provide intelligent, patient capital to help us on our journey. We believe that we have found that partner in YFM.”

YFM has a strong software portfolio, including data transformation software company Matillion, DevOps software platform QualityClouds, marketing automation platform Force24 and text analytics platform Relative Insight.

Roshan Puri, investment director at YFM, comments: “With its ability to translate software development data and processes into business metrics, Plandek is helping software engineering teams through to c-suite leaders make data-driven decisions in a way that has been commonplace in other areas of an organisation such as sales or finance, for example.

“The team at Plandek has a clear mission and are focused on delivering exceptional software to their customers, in turn helping their customers do the same. Companies that are accelerating their digital transformation journey are using Plandek as a core tool. A particularly successful route to market has proved to be via operating partners at large cap PE firms, where there is a real focus on value creation. We are really pleased to be partnering with the team and supporting them scaling up the business in the face of a massive market opportunity.”

The YFM Investment team comprised of Roshan Puri, Tiffany Young, Jamie Roberts, and Jonathan Marlow of YFM will be joining the Board of Plandek.

Eversheds provided legal due diligence; Pegafund (financial); Sonia Alllison-Penny (management); Crosslake (technology); Moreno (marketing); Sales Blueprint (sales); DTE Group (tax); and Kent Finance (financial modelling).