This fully distributed company with Philly roots announced a $2.5M seed round

Does location even matter in 2017?

Particularly for a cloud-focused company like IOPipe, one could say not having one specific location is even on-brand. Despite TechCrunch saying the company is Seattle-based, cofounder and CTO Erica Windisch clarified: Her company — which just announced a $2.5 million seed round from a mix of out-of-town investors —  isn’t headquartered in one specific city.

“Some of the press got it confused in structure: we’re actually a fully distributed team with cofounders in Philly and Seattle,” Windisch told Technical.ly. The idea for IOPipe was actually born in Philly, said Windisch, a software engineer who formerly worked with Docker.

The firms staff of eight is peppered throughout this great land. In the Philly area are Windisch and engineering lead Pam Selle (who’s based out of Indy Hall). Cofounder Adam Johnson is in Seattle, with the rest of the team scattered in Austin, Texas, Reno, Calif., Kansas City and San Francisco.

According to the SEC filing, the cash announced (which is valued at closer to $2.8 million after including some converted notes) was received in January of this year. So far, it has allowed the company to build out its product offering and grow the team to its current state.

As often happens with software startups, here’s the obligatory explainer of what the company actually does. We’ll let Windisch explain this one: “IOPipe provides tools for devs to build the next generation of serverless computers,” she said. “A lot of companies struggle with observability into their Amazon Lambda environment, so we’re providing a service to see what’s happening under the hood.”

Here’s more from Windish on the company’s pitch at the AWS Summit yesterday in New York:

The announcement of the cash was aligned with the launch of the company’s plugin, which will let customers integrate to the platform faster and allow for more integrations.

We've officially launched our tracing plugin! Learn more from @coreyalight on our blog: https://t.co/Le84KP4MT7 pic.twitter.com/Qxpe2IBKbz

— IOpipe (@IOpipes) August 10, 2017

If some of this sounds familiar, that’s because there’s another company with in a somewhat similar area: Stitch. Though they aren’t competitors and serve a different market need, CTO Windisch said there’s a good match in philosophy.