Runnable Raises $2M Seed Round To Expand Its “YouTube Of Code”

Runnable, a recently launched Palo Alto-based startup that aims to make it easy to discover and reuse code snippets, today announced that it has raised a $2 million seed round led by Sierra Ventures with additional investments from Resolute VC, AngelPad and 500 Startups. Hiten Shah, the founder of KISSmetrics and Isaac Roth, the founder of Makara, also participated in this round.

The service, which launched with about 1,000 code snippets for popular programming languages and APIs, plans to use this new influx of cash to onboard the companies that are currently waiting to bring code snippets for their APIs, libraries and SDKs onto the site.

Since its launch about four weeks ago, the team told me, it has now gotten requests from over 150 companies that want to add their code to its library. The idea behind the service is to turn it into a “YouTube of code.” Currently, the company argues, developers spend a lot of time searching for code snippets, but there is no single site where they can easily find them.

What makes Runnable so cool is that, in addition to finding these code snippets, you can also edit and run them right in the browser. To do this, the team just spins up a virtual machine to run the code in a few seconds and then destroys it when you’re done.

Right now, Runnable is still monitoring all the code submissions to the site. Over time, the company plans to open its service up to any developer or company. Runnable hopes that, as it becomes more popular, it will become the go-to site for any company or open source project that wants to get coders to use their tools. It bootstrapped this process by adding lots of snippets from PHP, Node.js, Ruby and other popular languages. Now, it will start adding snippets from new projects as it brings on these new partners.