Every time you check your bank balance, order takeout, or book a flight, you're relying on software to work. And not just “kinda work” - it needs to work flawlessly. Yet behind these everyday experiences lies a surprising truth: building software remains pretty unpredictable. According to Mckinsey, 78% of software projects ship late, over budget, or not at all. As Erik Severinghaus, co-founder of Bloomfilter, points out, "We have worse outcomes building iPhone apps than we do trying to build highways between major cities."
After 30 years of building software, with 20 years focused on venture-backed business platforms, Severinghaus decided it was time to tackle these inefficiencies head-on. Enter Bloomfilter, a process intelligence and process mining platform specifically created for the software development lifecycle.
Transforming Software Development Through Process Intelligence
How does Bloomfilter improve the software lifecycle? By using process mining – an analytical approach that examines digital footprints to reveal how work actually flows from start to finish. While this methodology has long helped industries like manufacturing identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies, Bloomfilter is the first to apply it to software development, analyzing the traces left in development tools to understand and optimize how software gets built.
Bloomfilter's platform connects with the tools that development teams use daily – JIRA, Figma, GitHub, GitLab, Azure, and others – to extract and analyze process flow information. The platform identifies where processes are weak, where teams deviate from workflows, where cycle times are lengthy, and where rework is common.
"The challenges are always the same," Severinghaus explains. "It's always hard to figure out what we're building, when we're going to get it, how much it's costing. And there's always the questions in the boardroom: How do we do more with less? How do we make sure that we actually hit our targets?"
The Catalyst Effect: Slowing Down to Speed Up
Through his network, Erik connected with Stage 2 Capital and ended up joining the 2023 Catalyst Cohort. Severinghaus admits he was initially hesitant. “I thought I knew most of this stuff... I thought we kind of had it all nailed,” he recalls, and even joked that he thought Bloomfilter would “test out of the program.”
That confidence lasted until his first session, ”I felt like I had been hit over the head with a two by four,” Severinghaus says, describing how the program's approach to scaling and emphasis on leading indicators of retention challenged everything he thought he knew. Instead of going full steam ahead, he went to his board with a different message: ”We've actually got to slow down. There's some things that we've got to firm up. We need to make sure that we've got the product nailed. We need to make sure that our GTM motion is strong, that we're able to truly speak the language of our customers."
Partnership with Celonis: A Game-Changing Alliance
This measured approach has really paid off. Just last week, Bloomfilter announced a partnership with Celonis, the world leader in process mining and process intelligence. While Celonis has traditionally focused on helping CFOs optimize financial operations, this partnership extends process mining's benefits to software development. Through Bloomfilter, CTOs and CIOs can now apply the same powerful analysis to their development processes.
“We had a clear vision from the start," Severinghaus shared. "What Celonis does for the CFO is what we're going to do for the CIO and CTO." This vision and a mutual connection led to something bigger than Bloomfilter initially imagined: Celonis chose them to power an entirely new offering, Celonis for the Software Development Lifecycle. The partnership positions Bloomfilter as a pioneer in Celonis's ecosystem.
Looking to the Future
The partnership with Celonis marks just the beginning of Bloomfilter's vision. When asked what advice he has for other founders who are also on a startup journey, Severinghaus reflects that success comes not through the typical startup "hustle culture" but through a more measured approach. "The key to succeeding as an entrepreneur lies much more through things like calm and rest and self-management than it does through the hustle culture and the 'do more faster' that is constantly fed through the ecosystem."
As Bloomfilter continues to grow and transform software development, Severinghaus offers this advice to fellow entrepreneurs: "Surround yourself with an amazing team of people that are smarter than you and that you can learn from every day. Find people like Stage 2 and get them in your corner, because it's practically a cheat code on what is a very, very difficult journey for all of us."