Monorepos are becoming an increasingly popular way to manage source code, but they require a slightly different toolset. Google developed its own internal build and test tool on top of its monorepo and then, in 2015, open sourced it as Bazel. Nine years on, there is a thriving ecosystem of Bazel-adjacent startups like NX and EngFlow that aim to make the tool a bit easier to use.
Also among them is Aspect, which was co-founded by CEO Alex Eagle and CTO Greg Magolan, who both previously worked on Bazel, Angular and adjacent projects at Google. COO Jenny Magolan and CXO Eva Howe, who have a marketing and legal background, respectively, are also cofounders. The company today announced a $3 million seed led by FirstMark Capital. That’s in addition to a $850,000 friends and family round the team raised earlier to bootstrap the development of Aspect.
While Bazel is extremely powerful, it is hard to use. In many ways, its origins as an internal Google tool still show. “Google has this reputation of: ‘we hire the smartest engineers, and therefore we can throw the most complicated tools at them,” Eagle said half-jokingly. Like other startups in this ecosystem, Aspect aims to improve the developer experience on top of Bazel.
But that’s not the only differentiator for the company, Eagle told me. That’s on top of all of the other benefits that Bazel offers like its caching system that helps bring down compute costs during the continuous integration process and support for multi-language repositories.
“We’re very open source as part of our culture, which I think is a big contrast with EngFlow, that seems like they’re more top-down, convincing management about the tool and engineers are sort of forced to follow along,” Eagle said when asked him how Aspect fits into the wider Bazel ecosystem. “We’re very much working directly with engineers. We spend a lot of time building the open source foundations that led a lot of our customers to find us.”
He also stressed that the team authored major parts of the Bazel tooling that people use, but more importantly, he said, Aspect aims to solve the entire developer productivity story. In Eagle’s view, it’s not just about the inner and outer loop of development — that is, the local development workflow and then the rest of the development process once that code gets checked into a version control system. “I think there’s even an outer outer loop, which is like standing up a new project. And this is when people talk about monorepo, they say, ‘Oh, the first thing I do with a new project, do I make a new repository?’”
All of this means Aspect’s overall mission is more ambitious and goes beyond using Bazel to make their build and test processes run faster. “There’s so many moving pieces that development teams are forced to make a lot of choices — and those choices interact with each other and it’s really hard to make something coherent that’s productive and consistent across an entire organization. With a large number of software teams, you don’t want all of them to pick something different, because then you have no economy of scale.”
Aspect has already signed up customers like Airtable, Coda, and Sourcegraph. Eagle tells me that the company has signed up about 20 enterprises so far.
“Engineering organizations have been moving to a multi-language reality for decades, and it’s created an abundance of productivity bottlenecks: delayed releases, broken builds and a lack of organization,” said FirstMark Principal David Waltcher. “I’ve known Alex and Greg for many years – they are world-class engineers and their contributions to Bazel and the ecosystem are immense. We see the potential in Aspect to build the de facto platform for unlocking scalable, multi-language repos.”