First-of-its-kind developer tool visualizes and generates system architectures, facilitates design reviews and enables real-time collaboration

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 multi-layered system architecture that underpins a company’s operations. Until now, development teams have relied upon makeshift solutions to collaborate on backend software design, such as whiteboards or poor diagramming tools. Multiplayer visualizes system architecture holistically and in its component parts with software 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) Enables formal design reviews including  feedback from all parties (team leads, developers, QA, CTO’s DevOps, etc.) before moving to implementation.
• Facilitates real time 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 company-owned space where the evolution of the platform is retained.
• Tames the SaaS sprawl by integrating with source control providers, SaaS and cloud providers with a centralized system dashboard for teams.

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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.”

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