Multiplayer Emerges from Stealth with $3M in Funding to Transform Distributed Software Development with AI

New York, NY, Aug 7, 2023 – Multiplayer, a collaborative tool for teams that work on distributed software, emerges from stealth with $3M in funding. The round was led by Bowery Capital with participation from Okapi Venture Capital, Mitch Wainer, co-founder of DigitalOcean, and Edith Harbaugh, founder of LaunchDarkly.

Conceptualized and built by developers to fill a gap in the market, Multiplayer provides a visual collaborative tool for the complicated and multi-layered system architecture that underpins a company’s operations. Until now, development teams have relied upon outdated or makeshift solutions to collaborate on backend software design, such as physical whiteboards or poor diagramming tools. Multiplayer enables teams to visualize their system architecture holistically and in its component parts with software that’s specifically built for this purpose.

Key features of Multiplayer:

• AI Assist generates everything teams need for distributed software, including: system architectures, APIs, service implementations, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), documentation and more.
• Visualizes system architecture at the highest level and enables detailed views of specific features and changes in real time.
• Communicates design intent by pulling together multiple document types (i.e. platform diagrams, APIs, sketches, rich-text docs, source code) for a feature
• Enables formal design reviews and allows for feedback from all parties (team leads, developers, QA, CTO’s DevOps, etc.) before moving to implementation.
• Facilitates real time team collaboration among distributed teams (akin to Figma but for the back end).
• Enables version control + branching.
• Ensures that system architecture will be recorded in a shared, company-owned space where the architecture can be maintained and the evolution of the platform is retained.
• Tames the SaaS sprawl by integrating with source control providers, SaaS and cloud providers and provides a centralized system dashboard for teams.

Says CEO and co-founder Steph Johnson, “Having been immersed in the developer world for years at DigitalOcean and MongoDB, I’ve observed the communication gaps within development teams.. There needs to be a better way to visualize and communicate architectural design decisions when working on distributed software. Surprisingly, in a world with so many dev tools, nothing facilitates seamless collaboration on backend software like Multiplayer, which we built specifically for this purpose.”

Adds CTO and co-founder Thomas Johnson, who brings 20 plus years as a developer at companies like Citrix, “This is an idea whose time has come. With distributed software being the norm today and teams being more spread out than ever, the gap in the market for a tool like Multiplayer has become very clear. Developers no longer need to bypass design reviews because they are ‘too much trouble.’ Multiplayer gives them an easy, organized way to share ideas and information before final implementation."

“Companies all over the world are developing distributed software. These systems are becoming more complex and harder to change without breaking things,” says Mitch Wainer, co-founder of DigitalOcean. “There’s a dire need for a dev tool that helps teams visualize and collaborate when making changes to their backend software. Multiplayer makes design reviews and feature development easier and more collaborative, targeting a massively underserved market in the dev tool space.”

Multiplayer will be available as a public beta this fall. To sign up, please visit www.multiplayer.app

Multiplayer is a collaborative tool for teams that work on distributed software. Started in 2023 by Steph and Thomas Johnson, Multiplayer brings together all the elements of backend software development in one platform to allow teams to both visualize their system and work on it collaboratively. To learn more, visit www.multiplayer.app